Survival of the Fittest
by Marnie
Summary: Rush and Young, alone together on the planet of the vampire lizards. What could possibly go wrong?
1. Chapter 1

"This is a scientific expedition. I'm the chief scientist. When we encounter a hitherto unknown space time phenomenon, it would be irresponsible in the highest degree for me not to investigate. This is what I'm here for, Eli."

"Yeah, but Volker," Eli raised his hands, gave a twist of the mouth that wasn't quite a smile. "Volker is our astrophysicist. Space time phenomena are totally his thing. You think maybe he should be allowed to go?"

"Actually," Volker dipped his head like he was expecting it to be cuffed, "I'm good to stay at home and watch it on kino. He smiled with bright nerves at Rush's disgusted look. "Analysing the data as it comes in is exciting enough for me. I don't mind if Dr. Rush takes my place."

"Well, thank you for your permission, Mr. Volker. I'm so glad we have that out of the way. Now can we please get started? This thing may have a time component."

_Oh hell,_ Eli thought, turning to watch as the shuttle pilot arrived in the docking bay. There was quite a little crowd here now, all the usual suspects, and he didn't know if it felt better or worse to know from their expressions that he wasn't the only one who thought this was the worst idea in the whole history of bad ideas. But he still seemed to be the only one with the nous to say anything about it. Who had died and suddenly made him the only responsible adult on the ship?

"Erm, Colonel Young? I thought maybe Lt. Scott would be the pilot for this one?"

Oh God, and they were already doing that thing. Eli looked from Rush to Young in dismay. That thing where you could see them sizing each other up for the next fight. Rush narrowed his eyes. Young crossed his arms. They both smiled like a drawing of knives.

"Scott's not out of quarantine yet. So you've got me. Shall we?"

They turned to go aboard with a weird synchronicity of movement for two people who were so at odds. Eli wasn't entirely sure whose life he was trying to save this time - both of them, maybe - when he pressed on anyway. "Um, so, as I was telling Dr. Rush, I'm not sure this data is worth the risk. Like, I mean, every time we send the shuttle out to investigate something, something disastrous goes wrong. So how about this one time we don't do it? Save ourselves, learn from our mistakes like rational people, that kind of thing?"

Say what you liked about the Colonel, but he generally listened to the voice of reason, even if he then chose to totally ignore it. He lifted his eyebrows in Rush's direction, inviting further comment.

"Oh for Pete's sake. We're here on the very edge of the universe among scientific marvels, and we're just going to sit safely at home and do nothing? Why did we come, then, if not to acquire knowledge? Why do we even bother?"

Young hit the control for the shuttle bay doors and motioned the scientist on board. He didn't say it, though something about his micro-smile suggested that he was thinking it. It was Greer who muttered the words after him, "Some of us weren't given a choice."

Rush buckled himself in. Young turned at the other side of the doors, ready to seal and pressurise the compartment. He must have caught Eli's distressed look - he paused and leaned forward to curve a hand around Eli's bicep, giving a reassuring squeeze. "Eli, don't worry. It's going to be fine."

Young's smile broadened a little, rueful and fond. Such a nice man, a kind, quiet, warm man, who noticed when you were upset and tried to offer comfort. Eli would totally have bought it, if he hadn't stood back and let Young murder Rush once already.

"We'll be expecting you both back in one piece," he said, feeling helpless and complicit, guilty and angry with himself for it. "Both of you, OK?"

"Eli, I got it." Young straightened up, expression closing over his own thoughts, apparently completely at ease. He touched the controls. Blast doors slammed down on Eli's concern, the locks cycling. The little knot of well wishers began to drift away as, from outside the door, came the thuds of the shuttle being decoupled from the hull and then the faint and rapidly fading vibration of its thrusters against Destiny's plating.

"Time to go and earn our keep," said Volker beside him, beaming like the innocent he was at the prospect of new astrophysical data. "You know, this is what I thought I was signing up for. More understanding the underlying principles of the cosmos, less being chased down corridors by aliens with guns. This should be good."

"Oh don't say that," Eli followed him back to the control room, refusing on principle to wring his hands. "That's like 'it's a piece of cake' or 'what could possibly go wrong?' We don't go provoking the universe with statements like that. It's like poking an anthill with a stick. Haven't you learned anything?"

The quiet in the shuttle was as awkward as any other time when they were together. Young concentrated on the controls, just glad to fly again. He didn't often get the chance, and though the shuttle handled more like a bus – heavy, unresponsive, underpowered – than like the whip sharp F302 he was used to, he would take what he could get and try to be grateful.

Ahead of them, the thing they were investigating writhed across a thousand miles of space like Zeus' thunderbolt, all silver flows and re-flows of energy. He stopped a safe distance away from it and flipped on the console next to the second chair. Rush unfolded himself from his seat, came forward to drop into the copilot's chair, take in the data with a single unimpressed sweep of his gaze. "We can't tell anything from out here, we need to get closer."

With someone else, Young might have admitted he was nervous. You knew how a planet behaved, or a star. Even a black hole could be predicted. You knew how far to stay away, what kind of trajectory would give you the best chance to escape if gravity or radiation or the heat or the EM field proved too intense. This thing was new and therefore totally unpredictable.

He'd have appreciated some back and forth about flight-paths and risks, but with Rush you never knew whether he was telling you the truth, or just feeding you a line to get you to do what he wanted. So it was pointless. Worse than pointless, working on bad intel. Better to have none at all.

"OK, I'm going to take it in a slow spiral to starboard, closing in on that... tendril at twelve o' clock. I don't know what conditions will be like, so hold on and shout if you see anything dangerous."

"Yeah, yeah," said Rush dismissively and gave him a gallows smile, "though you and I might have different definitions of what that is, aye?"

Young picked up the dark humour and begrudgingly smiled back. He'd long since stopped thinking Rush was a coward, but it took a special kind of balls to taunt your killer like this, even if, through circumstances beyond his control, the death sentence had not been so final as anyone expected. It reminded him pointedly of how lucky he was that Rush was tougher than any cockroach. He owed Rush for living on despite it all, the best thing that anyone had ever done for him in his whole life.

Still didn't mean he liked the man. "Anything that happens to this ship happens to you too."

A cold, creeping feeling travelled up his back and lifted the hair on the nape of his neck. Maybe he'd have felt it earlier with an F302, to which he was more attuned - the fluttering jolt through the frame, the almost sub-audible whine of engines beginning to labour. The readouts changed an instant later as he'd already known they would.

"D'you not think I know that?" And then the semi-sarcastic easy bantering tone dropped from Rush's voice as he hunched forward in fierce focus over his monitors, noticing the change. "Well now."

Young flipped the shuttle over, 180 degrees head over tail, engaged all the engines at full throttle, manoeuvring thrusters and all, as the blue white promontory of the thing filled the rearward viewscreen, strangely in motion. An ever changing electrical current with nothing visible to generate it. The engines' whine became a shrill and then a howl. The decking beneath his feet shuddered and groaned as the shuttle fought to get away from the sudden, inexorable pull.

"I've never seen a gradient like it." Rush sounded fascinated. Young gritted his teeth, his hands breaking out in an inconvenient sweat. OK, so there was no breaking free by main force. But if Rush's instruments could map the edges of it he could change course to skirt them, find a shallower patch, break free there.

"Some help here?" He tried to alter his angle of escape, but the pull was just as strong at 90 degrees as it was at zero, and he didn't like the feel of presenting the ship's belly to the thing, irrational though that was.

Rush's scientific interest had finally been replaced with a more appropriate level of hard faced fear. He reached up to flick on some switches. The shuttle's shield engaged, gold against the angry silver twining that was beginning to be visible even through the front windows, lighting up the cubbyholes of the small craft with harsh halogen light. "It's not just gravity. There's some kind of EM flow along those outer flares that the shields might interrupt."

A little of the brutal grip wavered. Not nearly enough. Young didn't like the feel of the engines, the thruster controls beginning to feel mushy, unresponsive in his hands. Oh shit. It was going to be another one of the fucking disasters for which his command was so justly famous. He knew it already. "That's not working. I need a course. Find us an edge with a shallower gradient."

"I, ah..." Rush clutched at his hair and then began to lever up a panel on the edge of his console. "There's too much data coming in. The shuttle's mainframe is overwhelmed. I'm routing it through to the Destiny now."

A moment. A very very long moment. Panicked voices yammered over the radio. The air began to smell of smoke as something in the engine caught fire. The shake of the airframe was beginning to work small fractures through the deck plating. A conduit in the passenger compartment burst in a shower of white sparks.

"All right," Rush held on to the sides of his console with both hands as if the information displaying there might spill if he didn't keep it steady. "Well, that's not good. Destiny can't find a course along the edges that doesn't lead to us breaking up in fifteen to twenty minutes. At best."

By this time, that wasn't a surprise. Young wondered if he could afford to give up now, finally accept the death he'd been courting one way or another since Icarus began. It would be mostly a relief, and he couldn't think of a better way to go than this.

"But the powerflows in this thing's interior are much smoother," Rush was still talking. "It's actually bearing some resemblance to the interior of the wormhole set up by a stargate." He looked exalted and fascinated and in his element. Young had to admit to envying him that.

"So?"

"If we keep trying to break away the shuttle will shake itself apart. But there's a possibility that if we go straight in, we might pass through, come out on the other side, relatively unharmed."

"Into what?"

"I've no idea," said Rush, mockingly, "but it's got to be better than this."

That seemed unwarrantedly optimistic to Young. An upswelling of darkness, tiredness, despair threatened to overwhelm him. If he dithered for a moment, if he just did nothing, it might all be finally over and leave him at rest.

But that would mean leaving Rush to die, and he'd sworn to himself it would never, it would_ never_ happen again. He flipped the ship back, the silver and ultraviolet seethe of energy overflowing the forward screen on either side. "Thrusters are failing. Give me a course while I can still steer."

The data streamed to his station. "You have it now."

He took a deep breath, aimed the shuttle at the centre of the storm. Terrible light swarmed over every surface, washing out all the shapes, blinding him. Rush laughed beside him, and the sound made him grin with borrowed resilience.

"See you on the other side."

The light swallowed them down.


	2. Chapter 2

Rush was the first to wake. Blinking emergency lights, no sound of any engine. Smell of scorched metal and burnt insulation and blood. He took stock.

He was draped over his console, head down, arms dangling, fingertips grazing the floor. Dust and grease and metal under his hands, they briefly fascinated him before he identified the hyperawareness as a problem and deliberately turned it inwards. Bruises all over his chest. His abdomen felt tender, but there was no swelling, no heat - nothing ruptured.

Pushing himself off the monitors he collapsed back into his seat. No head trauma, both legs seemed to work. His back hurt, but no more than you'd expect from being rammed into the edge of a table at high speed. He patted himself down. The blood wasn't his.

Well, good. That was one thing that didn't need worrying about then.

He blinked his eyes into as much focus as he could achieve, levered himself up and over into the pilot's chair, flipping the switches for lights and power and life support. The emergency lights wavered off and on again. Nothing else happened. By the feel of the switches, every relay along the line was burnt out, irreparable.

Memory hit him in an overwhelming deluge of information, almost as though he was there again, coming out of the phenomenon straight into the upper atmosphere of a planet, watching Young struggle and curse at unresponsive controls, flames streak up past the screen, as they tried to airbreak with a vehicle that was rapidly turning into an unguided meteor.

Not going to deny that he thought they wouldn't make it. He was so used, by now, to Young failing at everything he set his hand to to hold on to the hope they'd crash land in one piece. But the man had some skill, perhaps, if he was driven to it in extremis. Even /he/ couldn't manage to be entirely useless all the time, though God knew he made a more thorough attempt at it than anyone else Rush had ever known.

Speaking of Young, he had obviously been thrown out of his seat when the shuttle slammed in a shallow belly-flop against that little hill. He must have hit his head against the wall, been tumbled about the rear compartment of the shuttle like cement in a mixer ever since. He was just visible, in the dim light, jammed bonelessly into the far corner of the bay, a dark streak along the wall showing how he had finally slid to rest.

Not eighty percent sure of his course of action, Rush approached, got his hands under Young's shoulders and hauled his limp, unresisting form out into the middle of the floor, where visibility was a little higher. The man's eyes were closed, his face crimson and wet, but his breathing was steady and his pulse strong.

Looking down, the feel of yeilding tissue defenceless under his fingers, Rush considered the benefits of a life without Young. All he would need would be to press a little harder, and the man's unconsciousness would slip painlessly, untraceably into death. Scott would have to take over the military side of things, and the poor wee lad was a lamb to the slaughter next to Young's tough mutton. Get rid of the Colonel and the military would finally be back where they belonged - under the control of people capable of higher thought, a useful resource instead of a constant thorn in his side.

But there were disadvantages to this course of action too. One, he didn't know at present exactly how fucked up his current situation might be - a man with a gun might come in handy. Two, when he did get back to Destiny, and he refused to believe in any other outcome, if he turned up alone the crew would condemn him, evidence or not. Three, he refused to be the fucking savage that Young was. There was no way he was abandoning the moral high ground now he'd finally seized it, and there had to be more civilized methods of removing Young as an obstacle, if it carried on being necessary.

Young's black hair was sticky with blood, but it had begun to stiffen, and the veil of gore over his face was drying. The wound must be closing up by itself. Grateful for small mercies, Rush stopped touching him, rocked back onto his knees. As he did so he heard the noise for the first time. A little scratching clatter overhead, like a cat's claws scrabbling for purchase on the shuttle's sleek metal hull.

He scrambled up, too quickly, dizziness and nausea almost overwhelming, a headache pressing in like a stiletto over one eye as he raised his head to focus his gaze on the ceiling.

Nothing to see, but the scurrying scratch came again. Outside the shuttle its running lights were glimmering, glow-worm faint, drawing scarcely any power, illuminating nothing outside the screen. Nothing, that was, until something torpedo shaped, carved out of black jet or wet leather, came flying directly at the sensor. He got a nightmare glimpse of spreading tentacles around a piercing mouth, jabbing at the metal, sucking, thrashing its powerful tail to try to drive itself forward and through the shuttle's skin. Though he knew what he was seeing was only pixellated images from a camera outside, that really five inches of metal plating separated him and the creature, he still recoiled.

"Shit!" He hadn't given a toss for the girl in those days, but still the memory of one of those things slamming through Chloe's chest, wriggling itself completely inside her to feed - God, it still was enough to make him want to heave. "Shit."

He slammed his hands down on the dead controls, the offensively useless machine, and raised his face to the sky, challenging the kind of gods who'd chosen to decree that /this/ should be his life. "No! We left this place behind in another galaxy. We took the warning and never came. We cannot be back here. Is this some kind of cosmic joke? Because I don't think it's funny."

"Rush..."

Speaking of offensively useless. Young was back. He had rolled over, shakily hauled himself to his feet, was now holding himself upright by the molding on one of the shuttle's pillars, his fingers leaving red streaks on the gold. He had the gall to look annoyed, like any of this was Rush's fault.

"Rush, shut up and calm down."

It was like tipping one smoldering coal into a full drum of petrol. The explosion was glorious, burning away fear and thought and caution all at once, a blessed blessed relief from what he had been feeling before. He darted forward, jabbed Young in the chest with two fingers. "Don't you tell me to shut up. It was you who brought us here. You who got us trapped in that thing, because among the many things you can't do at all it turns out you can't fly a spaceship worth a damn."

The jab connected, sending a satisfying wave of impact up Rush's arm. But Young didn't even sway back, just took it, emotionless, impassive, immovable as always. It was like talking to a rock. Endlessly, maddeningly frustrating. He escalated his tactics to try to get a response, shoved Young with both hands, sending him reeling back into the wall. Young pushed himself back off, and there, there was the little flicker of the thin cold smile that said that Rush was finally getting to him.

"You can't get up in the morning. You can't think. God knows, Scott follows you out of pity. You're totally incapable of making a single decent decision, and you must leave me to pick up the pieces when you're done. It's your inadequacies that have brought us here, so don't-" He punctuated each word with a shove, feeling it work, feeling the violence rise closer and closer to the surface with each little blow. "Don't- tell me- to shut up."

Gleeful, giddy, he was waiting, and yet Young's right hook still caught him by surprise. He'd expected an attack to the face but this was straight into the belly, no nonsense, driving the breath out of him in a great 'Oh' of victory and joy. He got his right hand into Young's hair, yanked where the head-wound was, and when Young hissed with pain he smacked the side of his head into the shuttle's pillar.

This was more like it.

Young staggered, bent as if to fall to his knees. Rush took the chance to lace his fists together and bring them both down like a hammer on the base of his neck, but instead of collapsing, Young surged forwards, got his arms around Rush's legs and lifted him bodily off the ground, slamming his back into the clearly now even more defunct instruments. He rolled off onto the ground and lost track of exactly how the fight was going - a blur of impacts and knees. At some point he rammed his elbow in Young's mouth and got it bitten for his trouble. At another Young lifted his head by the hair and slammed it down twice on the floor, making him grey out.

It must have been after that that things started to go poorly, because the next thing he knew he was flat on his face, with Young's knee between his shoulderblades and Young's hand hard on the nape of his neck, pinning him to the floor.

Cool metal against his cheek, and a strength greater than his telling him that for once there was nowhere he needed to be, nothing he needed to do but lie down. His panic grounded itself, and all the aches and throbs of the fight turned into a reassurance that he was still alive.

"Are you done?"

Not quite the same question as last time, unless he had misinterpreted it all along. Sometimes Young's laconic ambiguity was difficult to parse. Perhaps he wasn't asking about their enmity in general, but only this one specific instance - not asking whether he could trust Rush to work with him in future, but only asking if, right now, it was safe to let him get up.

"For the moment," he said, glad to offer this one small concession in exchange for the endorphins, the distraction, the temporary feeling of relief.

Evidently this was the right answer. The hand and the knee disappeared from his back. Young limped into his peripheral vision, sitting hunched against the wall, with his head down, looking sullen and resentful, like a bear roused too early from hibernation. Rush smiled inwardly. The truth hurt, didn't it?

Young rested his chin on his hand. Split knuckles. A slide of new dark blood from his hairline down to his eyebrow. Rush gave himself another moment to enjoy the floor. In the silence between them, the claws or teeth or tentacles of the creatures could still be heard, skittering across the hull.

"Alone on the planet of the vampire lizards," Rush said at last, once he had regained the ability to mock. "What next?"

Young clasped his hands together and pinched the pale band of skin where his wedding ring used to be. He was all gathered back together now, calm and quiet and solid, as though the animal inside had never existed at all. "As you never stop reminding me, Rush, you're the genius. So. Ideas?"


	3. Chapter 3

Rush, Young thought, struggling to pull himself up out of the pit, was a piece of shit.

He breathed through the last remnants of his anger - as always it had felt damn fine while it lasted but the aftermath was crushing. Like shock after an injury, he could feel parts of himself shutting down, slowing to a stop, while all the space they normally took up was filled with self-loathing.

It wasn't like he didn't already know all the things that Rush had shouted at him. Oh no, he was so perfectly aware of them that sometimes he couldn't think of anything else. It seemed lately that everything had got to be too much for him. He tried - he kept trying. He kept on failing.

He wasn't sure where it had all started, this slow loss of the unassuming competence on which he had once prided himself. Emily had been a big part of it, but surely, if he'd been thinking straight even then, he would have found a better way of reacting to her ultimatums than by cheating on her with TJ. He couldn't possibly ever have thought that would turn out well. So the slide went back before Icarus. A creeping, helpless, unstoppable dissolution of everything he was.

But only Rush would pry it all open and haul it out to rub his face in it like this. Only Rush would think that using it against him like a weapon was somehow going to help the situation. That jab about Scott had been particularly vicious. It had all hurt, but that one he resented.

Pulling himself back together got harder every time, all the separate pieces weighed down with a kind of black, tarlike ooze of regret that made them hard to move. But he did it, slowly, watching Rush's face-down sprawl across the deck go from oddly relaxed back to wired contempt.

The man reacted pretty well to being beaten up. It had been that way last time too, when he came back on board after being left for dead. Yeah, there had been the mutiny, but that was a half-assed affair at best, mostly Camile's doing. Rush could have caused so much more trouble than he had. Instead he had kept the secret, offered a compromise, almost as though Young's ruthlessness or his strength had impressed the man.

So, perhaps physically dominating him was an effective way to get him to cooperate. Good to know. It was not Young's preferred MO, but in the matter of Rush he'd take what he could get.

A reflexive spiral of commentary in the back of his head started up, telling him that he could not trust the conclusion to which he'd just come, but these days every decision he made carried a cloud of nagging doubts. If he listened to them too hard he'd never get anything done. Drink quietened them down. Nothing else did.

But drink was not available, so instead he reviewed his litany of reasons to get up and carry on. There was no one on board Destiny who could do his job as well as he could. Rush had the decision making down pat, but his callous attitude, his secrecy, his lying, and his odd, pointless cruelties meant he hadn't a hope in hell of winning anyone's willing cooperation for long. Camile talked a good game but in practice did nothing useful to justify it. Scott... Scott was shaping up, but at the moment was too callow, too honest, too trusting to deal with any position that involved working with Rush. Besides, if he even tried to hand command to Scott, the boy would give it straight back, probably with a pleading look on top. It wasn't fair to ask.

_There's no one else. Suck it up and step up._

Sighing, he shoved away the little voice that rebuked him for having wasted a good five minutes trying not to drown inside his head, while life or death decisions awaited in the real world. He had Rush to tell him he was useless, he didn't need to do it himself.

The gleam was back in Rush's eye by now - the look of a man who had decided the universe was his toy and he didn't want to waste any playtime. "Alone on the planet of the vampire lizards. What next?"

"As you never stop reminding me, you're the genius Rush. So. Ideas?"

"Well, my first thought would be 'repair the shuttle. Fly back the way we came.'"

"I like it," Young smiled, put down a mental plank over the abyss inside his head and stamped on it. ___But if that was possible I don't think I'd have woken to find you panicking._"But..."

"But it cannot be done. I might be able to up the power to the external sensors, so we can see where we are. Maybe bring the navigation systems back online. Other than that, I think you already know it's a lost cause."

Young nodded, beginning to look round the shuttle, take stock of it not as a vehicle but as a resource. "So our way off this planet is the gate."

"Yeah. Once I have navigation up, I should be able to download a map to one of the kinos that'll give us some idea of how far it is and what the terrain's like between there and here." Rush sat up, set his back to the consoles as though he found their presence reassuring. His voice was a smooth musical lilt, laced with dark humour. Nice to listen to if you didn't pay too much attention to the words.

"Of course, that's assuming we don't just sit tight and wait to be rescued. We seem to have adequate life-support in here. I could perhaps rig some kind of distress signal, on the off-chance that Destiny comes for us. But let's be honest about this, that's never going to happen. They're never going to be stupid enough to chance her in that wormhole, when they don't even know if we survived. We're on our own."

Young got up. Not too bad - he was stable on his feet after a moment, though the headache felt like thumbs were trying to squeeze his eyes out of their sockets from the inside. Opening the storage beneath the passenger seats, he pulled out bottled water and a bar of the rancid-tasting trail rations Becker had made by combining alien-deer fat with protein mix.

The food was hard work, but it helped. As he chewed, he thought about Scott and Greer and TJ. Not completely sure about James - she hadn't been with him as long as the others - but probably her too. Eli and Chloe figured in on Rush's side: good kids, passionate, influential and oddly fond of Rush. There was no way that any of them were going to shrug this off and walk away.

"I wouldn't count Destiny out. But we've got the only shuttle, so even if they do turn up, we need to be at the gate."

"Agreed."

"Alright then," Young liked the feel of a plan, the way it turned the endless uncertainty of life into something measurable, achievable. "Here's what we'll do. You get the sensors and navigation up. I'll start prepping what I can find for a cross country hike. Then we'll both get a couple of hours sleep and set off in the morning."

"Oh, it's a fine plan and I hate to be the one who puts a spoke in it, but-" Rush waved an open palm at the animal noises scratching over the walls. "Are you not forgetting a big factor? Did the teeming horde of monsters outside not quite register?"

Young gave a huff of laughter and carried on determinedly ignoring the creatures. "If they could get in, they'd be in already. Let's do what we can here first before we worry about them."

With an exasperated look, Rush conceded the point. He took a screwdriver from his pocket and turned to begin prying panels off the instruments. Young retreated to the rear doors and as he did so he heard the sound of the deck grow hollow beneath him.

"What's down here?"

Rush looked back and away again, dismissively. "Never looked. It shows up on the schematics as a big empty space with a couple of explosive bolts and a couple of ring bolts. Eli calls it the smuggler's hold."

"You got another of those screwdrivers?"

"Is this really the time to be decreasing the structural integrity of the vessel? When we've rapacious leech-lizards trying to get in?" But Rush tossed him a smaller screwdriver anyway, and looked too relaxed for him to take this protest seriously.

"Four kinos and a deck panel makes a kino sled," Young answered, prying up the metal plating, unscrewing a further layer and looking in disbelief at what lay underneath. Three compacted rectangles of scorched cloth, each the size of a bale of hay. It looked like the explosive bolts designed to release them had gone off, but the outer doors had not opened. The force of the explosion had shattered an inner bulkhead, shredding the metal into long splinters, cutting through the neatly packed fabric, until only a small inner core remained undamaged.

He didn't quite have the energy to be angry again so soon, compromised on an unhappy laugh as he lowered himself into the compartment to free the slippery, silk-like fabric, haul it out into the shuttle-bay proper. _We had deceleration 'chutes all along? And nobody thought the pilots needed to know?_

Like most ancient technology, the chutes were both familiar and disturbingly strange. The fabric was amazingly light for its area. It had an organic feel, less like silk perhaps, more like the stretchy thin resilience of gut. There were no fibres in it when it was cut - it separated more like skin than like cloth. But it was dry and strong and incredibly useful. It seemed like an omen, he felt better already.

The metal splinters looked good too, one as long as his hand would do for a knife, another as long as his forearm for a machete, if he could only make them hilts. The smaller flakes might make arrowheads and spearheads for hunting, allowing him to save rifle ammunition for things that were trying to kill them.

He tipped them out onto the deck, wrapped a remnant of fabric around one end of the knife and began cutting up the parachutes to reshape into rucksacks and bandages, rope, a harness for the kino-sled so it could be dragged behind one of them, hands free. He was half way through cutting out a couple of six by five foot squares of the stuff and sewing them together with narrow strips – using the knife as an awl, in the absence of a needle - when Rush gave a semi-approving noise and the console lights brightened.

Young didn't stop, just sat tailor fashion, sewing mostly by touch and wishing for his reading glasses. "So?"

"Well, we appear to have landed right on top of a nest of the wee buggers, which probably explains why they won't leave us alone even though they must know by now we're not edible. I'll give them this, they're not actually trying to feed on the shuttle any more, just scampering about without a care in the world, enjoying the night air."

"So they're animals," Young ventured, pleased. "We can hope that if something doesn't look like food it won't be attacked."

"And how do you propose we make ourselves look like something that's not food? They seemed distinctly unconfused on that count, last time an away team came here. I seem to recall us all being dead within the hour, if you remember?"

"You got that terrain map?"

"Here." Rush passed him a kino remote, looking suspicious, as though a plan-making Young was so far out of his experience as to make him wonder if he was talking to the same consciousness. It was a little insulting, but then Rush had never known him in the old days, before it was true. Because Young might not know how to read Ancient, or do the work of a computer in his head, but wilderness survival was a different matter. He'd trained for this.

He turned on the map and scrolled, and the sick feeling of pre-emptive despair eased. Some good luck for a change. "How about that?"

Offering the kino remote back to Rush, he elaborated. "There's a ridge of mountains between here and the gate. We already know there are caves. So here's how we'll proceed: Every day we send the kino out to search for caves with small entrances within half a day's march. While it searches, we remain at our previous place of safety and use the time on survival tasks. When it finds a suitable cave, we get there asap, and block up the entrance behind us, walling ourselves in for the night. The creatures don't know we're there, so they leave us in peace. Next day we take down the wall, do the whole thing over, until we're at the gate."

Rush stepped back, looking more startled than he had back when Young had suggested using shuttle thrusters to nudge Destiny away from her imminent crash into a star. As though evidence that Young was not a complete moron defied the nature of his reality. "If they smell us and burrow through anyway, we'll be dead as soon as the sun sets tomorrow."

Young shrugged, less in bravery than in indifference. "You see another choice?"

"I... don't, in fact. But I also don't see why we have to take it that slow. Half a day's march?" Rush looked askance at the distance bar. "It's going to take weeks at that rate. Months even. If Destiny does come after us they'll have given up and gone by then. Why not just push through, fast as we can? I can do thirty miles in a day, we could be there in ten days."

Remembering Greer's account of Rush's behaviour on the lime desert planet, Young smiled to himself. Apparently Rush took on worlds the way he took on people, full speed, impatient, expecting them to yield to his ferocity and bow before the power of his will. It was arrogant and naïve and possibly a little touching. But it wasn't ever going to work.

"We've got margin for sustainability, and we've got margin for error. Trust me on this, we're going to need both."


	4. Chapter 4

This pace was going to drive him fucking mental. Rush sat in the half-open rear door of the shuttle, exploring the local area by kino. Lots of rocks. Trees, trees, fucking trees. He'd found a likely looking cave in the first two hours, bolted a ration bar and been ready to go, but no, Young had decided this was scout camp or the like and had barely glanced up from the piece of wood he was lashing round the end of a wicked looking knife. Like the man didn't have enough weapons already.

Well, maybe they made him feel calmer. Rush would feel calmer if he were some miles away by now, instead of right on top of a nest of chest-bursting tentacled fiends. The shuttle had taken some of the creatures out when it landed, and first thing in the morning Young had collected their corpses, stacked them together in a pile. They looked no better dead than they had alive. After finding the cave, Rush had succumbed to his curiosity and picked one up - ready for it to come alive in his hands - examined its limp clammy tentacles and that piercing mouth. Its eyes, when he opened them with a thumb, were the milky green of snot.

"Are we burying them?" he asked. Biology - it wasn't really a science at all, was it? Just poking at things with sticks, like nasty boys pulling the wings off flies to pass the time.

"Seeing if they're good to eat." Young tied off a knot on the hilt of his new knife and offered it to Rush. "Try a piece."

"Ach!" he let the thing drop, as revolted by the idea as he was by the limp water-balloon splot it made when it hit the ground. "And if it's poisonous? We left all the testing equipment on Destiny."

"Cut a little piece, hold it in your mouth for the count of ten, then spit it out. If nothing tingles or burns or makes you wanna heave, and you don't get sick overnight, tomorrow you get to try swallowing a bite. The day after that - so long as you're still not poisoned - we can probably certify it edible."

Three days just to acquire one piece of information. No wonder Young looked so at home. Rush waved the knife away with the first inkling that having your organs feasted on by lizards might be a more entertaining option than survival. "And why am I the guinea-pig?"

Young began fitting a longer hilt to something that looked ridiculously like a sword. He gave Rush a mild look of amusement that made Rush bristle all over. _Don't fucking laugh at me._

"I thought you'd approve. If you get ill, I can look after us both. If I get ill, we're both at risk. So you get to be the expendable one. It's one of those hard command decisions you're always telling me to take."

God, he had to be loving this, the bastard. Probably thought he was making some kind of point that Rush hadn't ever thought of before. Opening his eyes to his own cowardice and the inviolable sanctity of human life, no doubt. And no, it wasn't fun to be on the wrong side of that equation, but it didn't mean Rush couldn't accept that the reasoning was unassailable. He was no kind of hypocrite, thank you very much.

"I'm not eating any amount of it raw. The human body deals best with cooked food, not to mention we don't know what pathogens it might be carrying. Cook it, then we'll talk."

"I'm on that already," Young had said, though it was quite evident he was doing nothing of the sort. Rush's head hurt from too little sleep, all the bruises from yesterday stiffening up and pulling. The sunlight through the pine-like trees surrounding the clearing whirled and dopplered as wind stirred the branches, giving a strobe like effect, and even though Young appeared to have forgotten it, Rush could almost feel the rookery of evil little monsters slumbering under his feet. He went back into the shuttle and began to gather as much information through the kino as he could find.

Four more interminable hours dragged by. Young progressed from making knives to fiddling with sticks and string. Although Rush loved solitude, _needed_ solitude, the quiet was oppressive, and he wanted to be moving, doing something, solving this problem now. An end of chalk in his pocket tempted him, and he set the kino to return, fired up the data they had acquired while flying through the anomaly, and began to work out, on the floor, how long it would take Destiny to arrive if she was coming, what kind of calculations Eli would have to make to guide her through without smacking her straight into the planet the way they had done.

When the chalk ran out, and he had the shape of some very discouraging answers, he found it was noon. Young had successfully reinvented fire. Two of the octosaurs were roasting above it. The man had his jacket off, the sleeves of his black shirt rolled up, and was wrist-deep in the body of another, removing the guts, harvesting the little orange venom sacs.

He looked calmer than usual, if that was even possible, as though his usual phlegmatic indifference had underpinnings of strain, and the strain had eased. Fucking pace again, wasn't it? Young was getting things done, interfacing with the planet the way Rush interfaced with Destiny, observing, testing, finding things out, coming up with solutions, but the rate of data-transfer was just fucking intolerable. Three days to run a single query? How could anyone live like this?

Looking up and seeing that he was being watched, Young's smile was just that little bit friendlier than normal. "What are our options?"

"There's a possible cave four hours walk away, assuming a pace of four miles an hour. There's another that should take about six, but there's a herd of big furry beasts in the way. They're browsing on the trees, so I'm classing them as herbivores, but I won't speculate on what they'd do if they saw us and felt threatened. They might slow us down. Sunrise to noon was eleven hours, so we have eleven hours to get there, which in my estimation makes it worth trying for the further cave regardless."

"And the...?" Young nodded at the inside of the shuttle, where the white equations covering floor and walls and seats glimmered almost like lines of neon in this planet's green-tinged sunlight.

"Trying to work out when Destiny will get here if she's coming."

"So we have a deadline?"

Rush had encountered quite a few Air Force Colonels in his time at the SGC, enough to know that typically they did things the other way around – made the decision, then left their staff to figure out how to implement it. Telford did it that way around, reassuringly quick and take-charge and positive. Young always gave the impression that he was waiting for all the information to come in so that a decision could coalesce by itself, and Rush found _that_ cowardly.

"Not really," he admitted. "It depends on too many factors that can't be predicted – how long it'll take them to decide to do it, if they do. When they start, what route they pick through the centre of the thing. They have the data now and can choose, but we came through blind – doubtless we didn't come the best way. We don't even know whether it will always deposit a ship here or whether it connects back elsewhere."

"Bottom line?"

"They could arrive in the morning, they could arrive in six months. They might not arrive at all."

They exchanged a look, briefly and markedly on the same page. _Let's not even contemplate that._

"Then we go for the closest. Give ourselves the best chance. If it doesn't work we'll be just as dead tomorrow either way."

Rush examined the cave. He didn't know a thing about geology, but it looked good - just big enough for the two of them to stretch out in, if they left a corner for the detritus from the sledge. Dry. A fingernail-narrow crack along one wall let through a faint cold breeze. The entrance was two feet tall, required crawling through, and was surrounded by loose scree.

They were in the foothills. Below them a valley of long grasses swept down to a narrow rill of stream, where he had washed away the taste of octosaur. Not that it had been unpleasant - it had a faint flavour of mushrooms, in fact - but just because it lingered and reminded him of poison with every step. He didn't feel ill yet, but would he? If it was quietly rewriting his genetic code with unknown alien viruses, who knew how long it would take before any recognisable symptoms presented?

The afternoon had had a faint champagne theme - the sparkling blue sky empty of clouds, the grasses a pale fallow gold, and last night's sleeplessness making everything feel just that little bit woozy. Now, however, as he checked Young's work on dry-stone-walling them into this little refuge, the taste in his mouth was more like tin. His mind had sharpened again and his skin grown sensitized. The pressure of his t-shirt over his shoulders felt unbearable.

He jammed a couple of small stones into spaces, cutting off the last glimmer of light from outside. Laid the kino sledge on its side over the inside of the stone wall, reinforcing the jammed in stones with a layer of deck plating, and set all five kinos to maintain their position holding it in place. If something from outside pushed, they would push back.

Inside, lit by the one active kino remote, was a whey-blue watery twilight, full of the rustling sound and the horrible implications of Young lying down.

"I can't believe the first thing you made on this planet was a mattress," Rush offered, just to break the silence. Things were more civilized when you talked, yes? He sat down on the edge of that enormous bag that had puzzled him when Young had been sewing it last night. During the afternoon, Young had filled it with dry grass from the meadow, and now it crunched comfortably under Rush's weight, giving out a smell of toasted oats.

"Tomorrow I mean to find your furry herbivores and get a pelt," Young said stretching out on his side and drawing the remnants of the parachute material over himself. "For a coverlet."

It was so bizarre Rush had to laugh. "You fucking hedonist."

"Sleep is important. So are you going to get in?"

"There's not a chance in hell that I'll spend my last night of life in bed with you."

Young laughed too, companionably, and if he was afraid he was doing well at not showing it. "You wouldn't be my first choice either. Suit yourself."

Turning over, he pulled the other side of the mattress with him until he was encased in a sleeping-bag of hay. The sound of his breathing slowly lengthened and quietened as he dropped off. Rush sat awake for what seemed forever, getting painfully cold, startling with every noise outside, and trying not to admire the understated bravery of being able to sleep through this.

Probably it was nothing of the kind. Only a lack of imagination, another example of the strange, repellent passivity of the man - a mystery that didn't accord with his rank or the affection with which his subordinates regarded him. What was it that he had, exactly, that had allowed him to thwart Rush's attempts to remove him? What made Scott follow after him like a puppy, and Greer - Greer of all people, who seemed to have a perfectly functioning streak of independence - regard unquestioning obedience to Young as a virtue? It made no sense, except perhaps as another example of how stupid normal people were.

Two hours from dawn, Rush found himself willing to believe that they were going to live. At that thought, fatigue finally overwhelmed him. He blew on his cold hands, chafing them down his arms, and thought, _Sod it. You've spent all night contemplating him as it is. This can hardly be worse._ He nudged Young's ribs with the toe of his boot, getting a bleary look in return. "Make some room, I want in."

Young frowned as if he was trying to think of a witty comeback. Unsurprisingly, nothing must have come to mind. He rolled over in silence, presenting his back to Rush. Rush put himself down in the warm hay, back to back with the man, Young's heat filtering through to his spine and shoulders and kidneys. Sleep hit him like a hammer to the head.

On the ship, Young used to stand with his head down, his shoulders hunched. He used to move as though all his muscles had locked up over some terrible pain. He had looked injured. Rush hadn't noticed it then. He noticed it now because as the days went by it gradually eased. The man's head came up, his back straightening. His stride lengthened. Intermittently at first and then more often, he started to smile.

This evening's was a larger cave, big enough for them to light a fire inside. They had found clay by one of the rivers and made containers for water. A cook-pot sat in the flames now with a stew of red-feathered avian and saw-leaved-reed roots seething inside it. The giant furry beasts had proved inedible, giving Rush a fine outcropping of mouth ulcers when he tried. He inferred that was how they managed to co-exist with the octosaurs. But they had gradually acquired enough other known safe foods that, when the ration bars ran out, starvation was not a problem.

And he appreciated that. He did. It was odd and unnerving to be in the position where Young was the one possessed of the skills they needed to survive, where he had to defer to the other man's judgement. It was galling, but he wasn't going to knock it. He couldn't deny these were real skills – the fate of the settlers on Eden pointed that up well enough – and useful skills deserved respect. But still, food, sleep and shelter were fine things, essential things at a minimum, he just didn't think they should be enough.

"You like this," Rush said, not sure if this was praise or accusation.

"Yes," Young leaned against the far wall and watched him with a speculative sort of look, as if wondering if he could afford to open up a little – how defenceless it would leave him if Rush chose to go on the attack. "Used to do a lot of this with SG7. We got so practised we started thinking of it as vacation time." He leaned forward and served himself a bark mug full of stew, giving a rueful laugh. "The trouble is that when you're good at something they promote you to a position where you don't ever have to do it again."

It was startling to hear something so familiar from the other man's mouth. Rush laughed in turn. "Oh aye. Why d'you think I spend half my time hiding from the science staff? I'm not a fucking administrator, I'm not a 'team leader', I have my own work to do."

Was this the first time they'd ever had a personal conversation? He got his own food, kept his gaze on it, his hair shading his eyes, as he contemplated. It was probably just the first time he'd regarded Young as a person at all, rather than an obstacle in his way. "But is it enough for you? This..."

He waved a hand at the unhewn cave, the crude pot in the open fire, the smoked and stinking pelts that covered the grass mattress where they slept. "Because it's driving me insane. I have maths in my head that wants to come out. Speculations about the nature of the universe I want to test. I was so close to knowing what Destiny's mission was, and it's huge, I can taste it. And can you, really, be satisfied with this, this life that's scarcely better than the life of an animal? Is there nothing in you that wants more?"

The sound of Young's laugh altered, as though he felt he had been insulted. "I've spent my whole life in Stargate Command, Rush. You never asked yourself why?"

He never had. Speculating on other people's life choices was for the writers of soap operas and pointless political makeweights like Camile Wray. "I can't untangle the workings of your mind. That's why I asked you."

Young ducked his head as if to accept a scolding, a faint, wry twist to his mouth. "I wanted to see what was out there," he said, slowly at first, then gathering speed. "Find new things. Learn. Explore."

A sideways look that Rush couldn't interpret. "I don't have the brains to do it your way. So I had to be the guy who carries the gun. I couldn't figure it out beforehand, the way you do, but I could go there in person and look. I could be the one who protects the guy with the brains so that he can do his job. So that, at the end of the day, he can tell me what he found out in language small enough for me to understand it too."

It was such a paradigm shift it made something hurt in Rush's chest – anger or grief or both. He had to hit out to get it away from him. "Because you do such a bang up job of protecting me."

Young's face froze into immovability, the hard, heavy lines of it settling into stone. "And you never tell me a damn thing."


	5. Chapter 5

Maybe they had died that first night, Young thought, forcing himself to finish the food that had suddenly lost all its savour. After all 'walled up in a cave with Rush' sounded like a rough approximation of hell. He wished for a door he could slam to keep the other man out - some damn space and time alone to put himself back on an even keel. Somewhere he could walk, to cool down.

But there was nowhere. So he finished eating and pretended hard that Rush had stopped existing for a while. To his credit, the other man helped with this, staying silent, not pushing on this new revealed weakness until it gave way, as he so often did with the others.

Young wondered how many times he was going to try extending the hand of friendship before he learned better - how many times he would have it rejected before he stopped trying.

But these were old, tired thoughts. Old responses. Over the last few weeks good food, good sleep, exercise under sunlight, and simple problems that did not involve backstabbers both aboard ship and at Homeworld Command had done wonders to restore his mental equilibrium. The baffled, helpless fury Rush called out of him was there still, but the pain that made it difficult to repress had faded enough for him to tamp it down, work around it.

The answer was - he was going to try as many times as it took. Because, assuming they got back to Destiny, every moment that he could not trust Rush, that Rush could not trust him was a moment in which both of them were endangering the ship.

He broke a stick over his knee and fed the halves into the fire, watching the embers breathe and flicker, slightly bluer than an Earth fire, a meditative stirring of crimson and lilac amid the amber. There. Better.

Looking up, he saw that Rush was still kneeling with his head bowed forward, his hair over his face. He had stopped eating, was gazing at the surface of his stew as though it was a computer screen that he had configured to give him the answer to everything.

It struck Young forcibly, and for the first time, how much smaller Rush was than him - how slender, how breakable his long fingers, and the sharp bones of his shoulders. Young had never in all their time together thought of him as delicate - he came into a room like a storm, dismissing the stupid, barely tolerating the able, taking over, laying down the law, dominating everything in his path by the force of his personality, getting his own way in every way he could, honest and dishonest alike.

So it was a shock to see him when that relentless focus and will was withdrawn - long hair curling around his fine-boned face, all his roaring energy stilled - and to realize that he was also vulnerable. Out of the unpleasant cocktail of things he felt for Rush, it brought a new, insistent protectiveness firmly to the fore.

"It's how the SGC works," he offered, just in case this obvious fact had somehow escaped the scientist - God knew, sometimes the eggheads were completely oblivious to the way normal human beings behaved. "The SG teams function at all because the military personnel and the scientists trust each other to be on the same page - the soldiers helping the scientists to do their stuff, the scientists helping the soldiers to make informed decisions."

Rush uncurled a little, as though the defensive crouch had been a preparation for violence, had been abandoned as unnecessary now none was forthcoming. "The scientists should be in charge. You said yourself we've got the brains. We should make the decisions."

"Yeah, but you don't really want that." Just like Young did not really want to be having a deep discussion about SGC's command structure with a man who could take him apart, mentally, probably without even knowing he was doing it. "Because when we give you command of a science team, you neglect it in favour of doing your own thing."

That was maybe a little aggressive. He tried again, with less criticism. "And because you don't really want to be coordinating training manifests and liaising with the pen-pushers at Homeworld Command, and worrying about morale, and figuring out how to motivate the slackers and reward the able and keep discipline and console the friends of the casualties, and stop eighty untrained people who don't want to be here from falling apart into internecine warfare or despair. If you were doing that, imagine how much time you'd have left over for the science."

Rush uncurled enough to put his back to the wall and slump against it, wrapping both arms around himself. He had that European way of letting his emotions all hang out, and his face, now revealed, displayed a blend of semi-humorous challenge over a base of startlement. "I could do it. Better than you."

"I don't think so. I don't think you know, Rush, how little anyone aboard Destiny trusts you. And rightly so. Yeah, you pull our asses out of the fire on a regular basis, but you shove them straight back in there whenever it suits you. The crew're not as stupid as you think – they know that, to you, they're expendable. That kind of thing makes an impression."

"Trust," Rush sneered. "It's as bad as 'listen to your heart', isn't it? What kind of a rational basis is that for anything? What does it matter if you trust me or not, when you know I'm the best informed, the most competent person on board?"

Young washed out his mug and set it with the increasing pile of their belongings. He nudged the cookpot out of the middle of the fire, rinsed it out, and raked the embers together to give more light.

Maybe Rush actually believed what he'd just said. Maybe if you were used to a world in which there was one right answer to every question, it was even true. What a luxury that would be.

He shook his head. "It makes all the difference. If I can't trust you, I can't use your input. Yeah, I can get Eli to check it, maybe, introducing unnecessary delay. I can use what I know about your character to try to figure out whether you're lying this time or not - but again, delay, and frankly I don't know you that well."

Making an effort to calm down, he laid his hands flat on his knees. "If I'm indecisive it's partly because you poison the intel at source. Are you telling me the truth? Are you recklessly endangering us for your own selfish ends, again? I have to make that call every damn time, and it's fucking exhausting, Rush. I want to help you. I want you to help me. We're _supposed_ to do this together. But you sabotage that system every time, and I really, I really don't know why."

No answer. To be honest he hadn't expected one. Getting Rush to sit still and listen to his perspective was achievement enough for one evening, and he was willing to let the conversation lapse.

On the positive side, at least Rush was good at silence. Something that Young as a fellow introvert appreciated deeply at times. This would have been so much worse if he were stuck in here with someone who never shut up. Now Rush retired to his corner, where he was neatly stitching up a new undershirt out of the parachute material, and was quiet except for an aggrieved sigh now and again, when he reached the end of the coarse green thread, or his stitches did not prove as perfect as he preferred.

Young wondered how long it would take before he... ah. There he went. He put the shirt down and swept the dirt on the floor aside, so he could scratch numbers on the pale stone with the scorched end of a stick. He couldn't stem the math for long, clearly, like a poet at the mercy of his muse.

When he was growing up, Young would have given anything for a talent like that, something that would set him apart and mark him out with a vocation for life. These days he mostly preferred the reassurance of knowing that he was just another one of the herd, because genius existed to serve the people, not the other way around.

He had a thought, gathered up a bundle of the smaller twigs, breaking them to size, peeling off the bark. Sweeping a spot clean in the centre of the fire, he packed them tight in the cookpot and inverted it in the cleared spot, piling all the embers over the top. Before long the gasses escaping out of the bottom were lavender blue, so it seemed to be working.

Leaving it to cook, he spread out the rolled up fur, took off his jacket and boots and wriggled into bed. As with his gracious and welcome silence, Rush had proved to be far from the worst person he'd ever bunked with. Generally, Young fell asleep before Rush got in and rarely woke before he got out, so any awkwardness was minimized.

Admittedly the man was a restless sleeper - there was always a risk of being jabbed with elbows in the face or knees in the kidney, or waking up to find Rush had stolen the cover or edged him off the mattress altogether to sleep on stones, but Young slept heavily, having years of insomnia to make up for, and these things didn't trouble him much.

Tonight he half expected Rush not to bother with sleep at all, so he was surprised that as soon as the fire died down, Rush slid in beside him and lay, hands behind his head, frowning at the ceiling as though he were trying to model the behaviour of the smoke that whisped and eddied up there.

Young scooted away to put some distance between his nose and Rush's right elbow, doing his best to be unobtrusive and unthreatening. He closed his eyes, and heard Rush sigh again, a cadence he didn't recognise in the musical voice. With one of his people he might have prompted "Are you OK?" but with Rush he judged it better to carry on pretending he wasn't there at all.

Maybe it worked. Maybe this was just due anyway and nothing would have stopped it once it had been jarred free.

"They used to lie in wait for me outside the library," Rush said. "Big lads, lads like you. It got so if I didn't want my head kicked in every single day, I had to pretend to be one of them. Stupid, I mean. I had to sneak off and study behind everyone's backs, hide my books. Lie."

He paused, but Young could tell it was not an invitation to comment, just a marshalling of thoughts before he carried on. So although Young would have liked to say 'not like me', he kept it in and waited.

"I get to sixteen and my dad wants me to leave school, get a job, bring in some money, because what does a skanky little Glaswegian kid want with a nancy subject like pure maths anyway? I tell him 'fuck you.' He tells me 'get out of my house.' So I do. I hold down two jobs while I pay my way through school - I don't ask for anyone's help, I don't need it."

Young risked opening an eye, found Rush covering his face with both hands, still directing this angry monologue to the ceiling, as if it contained the compounded insults of forty years.

"_Then_," he went on bitterly, "I get a scholarship to Oxford, I think 'now, finally, I've found my own kind.' You know? I'm looking forward to the dizzy heights of the best intellectual conversation in the land - and they turn out to be a bunch of upper class wankers who despise me as a common thug and laugh at my accent even as they're stealing my ideas.

"I come to the States and it's all 'why are you spending so much time on your own work, you must teach class!' and I'm thinking 'if any of these pampered jessies had half the gumption I had they wouldn't need me.'

"So I come to the SGC instead, and it's astonishing - it's what I was made for. It's the purpose of my existence. But they don't like my 'attitude', and I know I have to make myself indispensable, or they'll kick me out. I have to know more than everyone else, and I have to keep it to myself, or they'll bring someone else in and I'll be out on the streets again.

"And now I have to be indispensable here, or you, _you_ will knock me out and leave me for dead. So yeah, I have secrets, and yeah sometimes I lie. I _need to_, to be _safe_, because no one has_ ever_ helped me and I really don't think _you're_ the one who's going to start."


	6. Chapter 6

The bed dipped as Young raised himself on one elbow. Rush had the sudden horrifying premonition that the colonel was going to ruffle his hair again, or worse, maybe even try to hug him.

"If you touch me right now," he said through gritted teeth, "I will break your face."

A glance showed Young looking typically impassive, accepting the rebuke with his usual lack of response. Waiting to understand what he had done to deserve it.

"I wasn't asking for your sympathy," Rush clarified, having to guess what was going on behind that blank facade - supposing it was something unhelpful and emotional and functionally irrelevant. "You asked me a question and I answered it. No more than that."

Young did that thing that pissed Rush off more and more every time it happened. He paused just long enough to let Rush see that he disagreed, and then he backed off, ruling a line under the argument without giving Rush the chance to pick it apart and analyse, and win it.

"OK. Fine."

Whatever it was that Young was silently disagreeing about was probably better left in merciful obscurity, however. He did not want to chance discovering that a man like Young might feel sorry for him. He half suspected it already and it made him itch with fury. Better not to have that hypothesis confirmed.

"Just to clarify. No hugging, no touching, no manly pats on the back, no-"

"OK. I got it." Young turned over to face the wall, still shut off, shut down, in hiding, like a little tender sea anemone that's just been prodded. Rush had to laugh at the thought.

A moment later he heard Young huff with amusement at some reflection of his own. He drew the fur up over both of them and settled.

A quiet darkness rolled in from the corners of the room and weighed on Rush's eyes, and though he had expected to regret having given so much away, he found instead it was pleasant to have got it off his chest. Considering how the conversation could have gone, the current peace was an oddly companionable way to fall asleep.

"I have something for you," said Young in the morning, as Rush was unwedging the stones from the cave entrance one by one. Verdant light was already spilling through the gap he had made, making the pale stone of the rocks seem white as paper. He glanced back.

The colonel was looking particularly tousled these days. He persisted in shaving every morning, using his knife as a razor, but his shaggy hair had passed any definition of a regulation military cut some time ago, adding an appealing touch of whimsical softness to his otherwise rock-like appearance. Probably there was a touch of troll in his ancestry somewhere...

"Here," Young interrupted Rush's thoughts by holding out the cook pot with a (carefully moderated) look of achievement. Rush took it, preparing to be unimpressed, and looked down at a bundle of sticks of dark, dense, writing charcoal. "I noticed you'd run out of chalk."

Rush took a stick out, feeling it squeak between his fingertips, hearing the dry, brittle sound of it. A stroke of black over the nearest wall, the glide as smooth as butter, the press of knowledge and speculation and curiosity inside his head given an outlet. His chest trembled with something intolerably glad, making his breath hitch, but he ignored it in favour of all that unmarked white wall.

After a while, Young took the rest of the door down and went away - to do something vital to the average caveman, undoubtedly - leaving Rush in peace with his thoughts, and it was as though he'd been pulled out of the water before he even knew he was drowning, given back his mind and heart and hands.

Over the next three days Rush considered the conversation and the gift.

(Day one, found fish and berries, nothing to report. Day two - only suitable cave estimated twenty one hours away. A day lost so they could start walking at first light on day three, making a forced march almost into twilight. Fucking terrifying.)

Provisionally, as a result of both factors, and with an option to move him back out again if he disappointed, Rush moved Young from his mental category of 'subhuman' into that of 'real people.' It was quite an exclusive gathering. Mandy was there already, obviously, along with Chloe and Eli, all of them with minds he could respect. Young had to be allowed in as an honorary member only, but from what he'd said earlier, he himself knew he didn't come close to the requisite requirements. He got extra points for the clarity of that understanding.

The decision to regard the man as a fellow human being had some consequences that Rush had not anticipated, though perhaps he should. Rush wasn't, after all, the kind of ivory-tower academic who could afford to ignore the fact that they had a body at all. He'd largely come to terms with the burdensome irrationalities that being encased in this particular meat sack entailed, but this... this was new and... well, he couldn't quite decide whether it was troubling or intriguing or both.

It began when he looked across the fire one evening to watch Young fitting a metal sliver to an arrow shaft and idly thought that the man had very nice hands. Neater than the rest of him, capable without being brutish.

The thought seemed innocent enough at the time – a passing observation of no moment. But it recurred, prompting other, similar discoveries. The curve of the man's shoulders, for example, had an aesthetic appeal he'd never noticed before, and there was something really quite pleasing about the compact strength of his back.

This was all easy enough to overlook. The reveries he began to fall into were less so. The memory of Young's bruising physical power no longer seemed so very unpleasant to contemplate, and when Rush dreamed - as he sometimes still did - of their fights, of Young laying him out on that desert planet, the context began to shift in some quite unexpected directions.

Rush wasn't sure whether to be amused or appalled, watching the progress of these thoughts with scientific interest. What a fascinating case study in the malleability of perception this was, and if it tended towards a clearly predefined outcome, well, that could be entertaining, and who was to know? It was not as though they were not already bound tight by one terrible shared secret.

A week later it had progressed to the stage where he liked looking at Young's face because he found it handsome. This was clearly a delusion, but one with many compensations, not least of which was the fact that Young had begun to give him nervous looks, and it pleased him no end to see the man so off-balance over him.

It was almost a certainty that the same thing was happening to Young, human biology being what it was, and oh, what a delicious thought that was. American military men - was there ever a set of more repressed homophobes in the world? The anguish, the self-questioning, the horror the poor colonel must be going through right now - it made Rush want to laugh. He could fuck Young and fuck with him at one and the same time. Just imagining it was the most fun he'd had in the whole trip.

So. No sense in waiting about. Having made the resolution he decided to act on it.

The day had been a grim one. Rain, almost heavy enough to make him homesick for Scotland, had beaten on them unceasingly as they splashed through every deepening patch of mud. He'd had the idea of making webbing so the bedding and the dry tinder could be suspended beneath the sledge, keeping it relatively dry, but it was the only thing that was. The basket of star-shaped sky blue fruit they'd collected the day before had bloomed with virulent yellow mould so furry he had decided to push it off the sledge with a stick rather than risk touching it.

It all seemed both the perfect excuse and a fine reason to allow himself some indulgence. Once they were safely walled and barricaded in, he took both his shirts off and hung them to dry by the fire, sliding into the furs with a sense of enterprise and exploration, open as always to all varieties of new experience.

They had always started the evening back to back. That wouldn't do. This time he drew up close and plastered himself over Young, getting an arm over that broad chest, fitting himself up against the other man as close as he could go. Close enough, certainly, to feel the jerk as the man's muscles locked up in surprise. His heartbeat sped beneath Rush's pressing hand.

"Rush?"

Uncertainty. He liked that. Young's dark, unruly curls were not quite long enough to hide the angle where his strong throat curved into the heavy muscles of his shoulders. God but the man was sturdily made, Rush could probably bite there quite hard without doing any disabling damage.

He made an attempt at it, but tongue and teeth had scarcely engaged before Young had shoved him away with a strangled gasp of shock that made Rush feel more triumph than any reaction Rush had ever managed to provoke from him before.

Young turned over, put a foot's distance between them and slammed an outspread hand into Rush's chest, holding him away. His eyes were wide and a little frightened, but not in the slightest bit confused. "I was... all on board with the 'no touching' policy. What...?"

Rush shrugged, gave his best feral grin. "Changed my mind, didn't I? So c'mon - you can't tell me you never thought about it, eh? When you had me pinned down on that shuttle? You never wanted to take it that little bit further? Show me properly who was the boss? Make me scream? Now's your chance."

Miscalculation, apparently. He surprised himself with the strength of his reaction to that little scenario, discovering kinks he hadn't known he had, but Young's reaction was not as desired. The colonel scrambled up, out of the bed altogether, backed away until he had met the far wall and could go no further.

Flush against the wall, his hands behind him, palms flat against the rock, looking cornered and guilty and... distinctly interested. Ah. Rush rose to pursue.

Nowhere further to retreat, Young stood quite still as Rush approached. His fingers curled against the wall as Rush reached up to kiss him. Rush grabbed his wrists to keep them there, and pressed in. Young's mouth opened to him, very soft, very tentative, scarcely even resisting him at all, and that was not what he wanted, he didn't want tenderness. Not from Young.

He pulled back, licked his lips, Young's hands still quiescent in his, his gaze still half-afraid, stupidly vulnerable. "You are such a coward," Rush told him, whispering it into his face, so close his lips grazed stubble. "You think you can hide your demons under this milk-and-water pretence? You think I don't know that what you really want is to have me helpless under you, to teach me a lesson I won't forget? We both know what you are, Young. You're the only one who can't face it."

He'd been hoping for this, angling for this. It still took him by surprise when Young broke his grip with contemptuous ease, got him by the hair and the belt, spun him and slammed him face first into the wall. Sandstone grazed Rush's chest and his cheek as he was driven into it by Young's weight. He made an embarrassing noise - a sort of high pitched groan. So, it turned out he liked that even more than he had anticipated, as lust rolled over him like warm oil, liquid gold and sleek.

"You want this?" Young shoved again, harder, his tone now like a cleaver, sharp and heavy. "Then you ask for it."

Did the man not understand anything? Never heard of roleplay or spontaneity? Never had an inkling of who he was dealing with? He'd be waiting a long long time if he expected Rush to beg for anything. "Oh, fuck you!"

"You've already made me a murderer. No more. You ask or you get nothing."

Rush couldn't move his face at all, but he could arch his back and press his arse harder into Young's groin, hear the man's breathing go ragged by his ear. "You don't have the self-control to stop this now."

That, as it turned out, really was a miscalculation. There was a moment of something - desolation, perhaps, or barely reined in violence - and then Rush had to catch at the wall to stop himself from falling as Young's anchoring weight was suddenly withdrawn. He was left there alone, feeling too cold, too turned on, angry, shaky and humiliated.

See this was why it was better to sleep with pretty girls, girls who were still inexperienced enough to be overawed and grateful and easily impressed. Unfortunately there were none such available at present.

Rush leaned his forehead on his arms and waited until the chill of the air had soothed some of the ragged edge of his need, then he turned and walked with as much composure as he could manage, back to the mattress. Young sat hunched up on the other side of it with the pelt wrapped around him, his face in his hands.

"You made yourself a murderer." Rush offered in the tone of voice appropriate for an apology.

"I know."

"Albeit, to be fair," Rush sat down next to him, pulling on the edge of the cover until he ceded half, "Not a very effective one."

Young gave a hollow laugh, and allowed Rush to lean into his side, where it was warm. "And you couldn't think of a better way to broach this subject than to make me feel like shit about it?"

Rush considered his options and settled on rueful. Rueful and charming. "Well, it's not like I've had a lot of experience in asking men to fuck me. You'd be my first."


	7. Chapter 7

Young closed himself into the darkness behind his hands and tried to grapple with what had just happened. He'd been half asleep, yanked suddenly from 'no touching' to full on rape fantasy, and it... God he didn't know what to think of the fact that he'd responded to that. The fact that there was anything in him that reacted to that scenario without repulsion was...

The man was always... He was always... He got his knives in there and he uncovered stuff that... He made Young think and do things that Young ___couldn't bear_. Not again. Not___again__!_

Young didn't know what to do. How could he carry on breathing? How could he ever move again, ever get up and do things in the world and not know that this was in him?

And maybe, maybe that was Rush's plan all along - to destroy him by showing him himself - but it didn't matter. It didn't matter, because like the man said, Rush hadn't put that stuff there. That stuff belonged to Young. No amount of pushing could have brought it out if it hadn't been there to be found.

Hands closed around his forearm. He jerked away but they just came back, tugging to try to get him to uncover his face, and he didn't want to, but he supposed he didn't really deserve to get what he wanted.

He lowered his hands, didn't know what to make of the fact that Rush kept on holding his arm, the grip sliding down to his wrist, almost like a gesture of reassurance. Except that Rush would hardly comfort him now - now he had achieved the aim he'd been pursuing over the past two years and finally broken him.

He looked up to find Rush watching him as though he was an interesting problem the scientist was preparing to solve. An intent look, but without any of the triumph Young would have expected. He would almost have called it concerned, had it come from anyone else.

"And what did you think I was doing just then?" Rush asked, in a reassuring blend of calm and curiosity. "If you don't think I was asking you to fuck me?"

He was too tired. He was too tired to deal with these games any more. He wished fiercely for a suicide mission that someone would actually allow him to go through with, but of course there was nothing available. Nor could he be selfish enough to just walk out of the door and die here, if it meant leaving Rush behind again.

"I don't know," he whispered. "Maybe trying to get me to do something we'd both regret."

"You think I would try to goad you into raping me for real?" Unbelievably, Rush sounded amused by this, as if the mere thought of it didn't sicken him. "Why would I do that now?"

"Because you know I'd kill myself after."

Rush's amused look turned into a full blown approving smile, cat got the cream style. He leaned forward - and they were already closer than they had ever been before, the man's shoulder tucked against Young's, his bare flank pressed against Young's chest. He shifted the grip that he had on Young's arm to the back of his neck, his thumb making little circles against the skin under Young's ear. And he kept on smiling, his dark, dark eyes intent, engaged, warm as an ember of coal.

"Well, that's quite a ruthless plan. I have to say I'm impressed, colonel, both with the level of self-sacrifice of which you think I'm capable, and the Machiavellian villainy you must have in you to think it up at all."

He wasn't quite sure why Rush would choose to fling him a lifeline right now, but that was what it felt like. The calm, urbane voice settling some of his horror, trying to tell him that he'd overreacted, that things weren't that bad.

"I wish I'd thought of it myself."

In a quick move that Young hadn't anticipated, Rush tugged his shirt up and over his head, peeled it down his arms and went away to hang it by the fire with his own. Young was not feeling robust enough to find the willpower to resist this, and besides it felt better without the damp thing clinging. He should have taken it off himself, but he'd thought it would be awkward. Now that hardly seemed to matter.

"But you seem to have overlooked one thing." It was still the odd, compassionate version of Rush who came back, his normal level of strident challenge dialled down. He gave comfort as he did everything else - sideways, blindsiding you with it. But Young had only ever heard him use this tone of voice before with Chloe. A tone where the irony had under it something gentle, almost parental. Something that Young very much liked.

"What have I overlooked?"

"Well, it wouldn't have been a very effective plan would it? You refused."

Did that matter?___Obviously_he had refused.___Obviously_he would never___do_ something like that. But did that somehow make it better that he was capable of thinking it?

Maybe it did, as it mattered that he got himself together every day to work despite his profound wish to just stop and lie down. He'd have to think about it more, at length, some time when he was not shaky and half in shock. Camile would tell him to go to a therapist, no doubt, but that wasn't an option, nor was talking about it any further to Rush. The scientist had a short tolerance for weakness, and Young didn't want to strain it.

He let himself be manhandled back into bed, lay on his back and watched the steam rise from their shirts and gather to pearl in the arch of the roof. Since the no touching policy seemed comprehensively blown out of the water, he didn't object when Rush curled himself into his side, resting his head in the hollow of Young's shoulder, flinging an arm and a leg over him as if to keep him in place, and tucking the pelt firmly in around them on all sides.

The wet cold of the day began to re-emerge from where it had sunk into his bone marrow, chilling him from the inside, but he put an arm round Rush and held on. Gradually it passed, and warmth filled up the spaces it left behind. He hadn't held another person like this for years, and the profound, wordless comfort of it felt like the sun coming out after a long dreary winter.

In the silence he could feel Rush breathing. Could almost feel him thinking, like a fizz of electricity along his skin. He curved up his other hand, shifting a little so he could card his fingers through Rush's hair.

"Why?"

"Why what?"

"Two years you've been trying to destroy me, one way or another. Why would you stop, now you've finally found something that worked?"

He could feel the edge of Rush's sickle smile against his skin, a rasp of coarse hair and teeth - and beard-burn was not something he'd ever envisaged in his future, but the feeling was far from unpleasant.

"Well," Rush's tone had taken a step up in energy level and unpleasantness, but Young thought it was still not entirely serious, joking rather than malicious. "I'd set my heart on sex tonight, and you're the only one here to give it to me. Also, I need you around at present. I think I'll hold off on destroying you until I've no use for you any more."

"And if you pass up your only chance?"

"There'll always be other chances. But if not, so be it. I will give you this, you're a more challenging opponent than anyone else aboard - and do tell Eli I said that. He'll be crushed."

Young found himself recovered enough to laugh. "Do you practice to be this much of a bastard, or does it come naturally?"

"Oh, it's refined," Rush whispered into the side of Young's throat. "It's refined and polished like an art, I assure you. I do nothing haphazardly."

It seemed a strange thing to boast about, but right at this moment Young did not feel in a position to criticise anyone else's morals. He was grateful, he found. Grateful to have been rescued from the paralysis of guilt, to have been stapled back together and allowed to rest until he felt solid again. He wasn't sure what had changed recently - Rush's excuses aside, he'd have gone for the jugular a fortnight ago - but Young was quite willing to run with it, even if one of the consequences was the way the words being murmured into his throat had been replaced with a series of long, sucking bites.

The first had been... weird. Weird as in a combination of man-beard-Rush. But the slow sucking ache of pleasure and the oversensitive scrape of bristle over bruise had made him get with the programme pretty damn quick.

Rush wanted this. Had wanted it all along, in fact. There was nothing at all to be scared of. So he got both hands into the man's hair and clenched them, watching as Rush's breath hitched at the pull. His mouth fell open and Young took possession of it, kissing deep.

Rush made a little 'mm' of approval and re-established control - the kiss turned exploratory, almost clinical. Young could feel him thinking too hard, his forehead creasing. His slender frame tightened under Young's hands with a kind of irritable frustration, wanting something he wasn't getting.

Young wasn't even going to think about what that was, but he could go a step or two in that direction if it meant more fun for them both. He rolled them both over, not being too careful about how he landed, letting his full weight fall on the smaller man and drive him deep into the mattress, drive the breath out of his chest and make it hard for him to pull it back.

Rush coughed and laboured for breath, his dark eyes gone black from rim to rim as he tipped back his head to offer Young his throat. Young grabbed one wrist and then the other, pinned them above Rush's head with his left hand and felt Rush try to arc up against him, get more pressure, more friction against his straining prick.

This was all right, he could do this. "What do you want?" he said, to be sure, with his right hand between them, easing open the buckle of Rush's belt.

"I want you to fuck me. Hard. Make it hurt if you can."

"No."

"Well, we can work up to that. Just hard then. Hard would be good."

Young had always been strong. Strong and a little clumsy. He'd worked all his life on being gentle, worked to treat his lovers like they were precious, to let them know how honoured he was that they'd trust him not to hurt them, worked not to betray that trust. So it was difficult at first to unlearn all of that. Not even watching Rush wrecked and reckless under him, making little whining pleading noises that he tried to smother in the crook of his arm could he entirely let go of the fear of doing harm.

"C'mon," Rush groaned when he was seated deep. "C'mon, I know you have more than this. Don't be a fucking coward. Come on."

Sweaty and pinned and still so demanding. Fine. Let him reap what he'd sowed. Young put all his strength into the next thrust, cramming Rush's head up against their pinned hands, slamming him forward and down, driving the breath out of him as he drove deep. "Yes," Rush couldn't speak, could only whisper it, over and again as Young did it more. "Yes yes yes yes. Oh God!"

Young wrapped a hand around his throat and throttled, judging the pressure carefully, making Rush's cries increase in pitch and urgency. Rush struggled under him, his wrists flexing in Young's grasp, his back trying to arch, but he carried on gasping 'yes,' so it was all good.

The purely animal cry he made when he came might have made Young feel godlike if he had been paying any attention - stopped Rush from thinking for at least a minute - but he was too preoccupied with his own climax by then, narrowed down and blessedly freed from everything except bliss.

"I think you can do better," said Rush, when Young had used an end of cloth to wipe them down and taken the trousers away to dry by the fire and brought them both a cup of vine flower tea. The fact that Rush had not moved at all during these tasks, but had lain sprawled out in the bed as though his bones had turned to honey, gave the lie to his critical tone.

"I can always do better," Young agreed amicably. "___Per ardua ad astra_, as your lot say. It's an Air Force thing."

"But it was not bad for a start."

Well. Praise. How about that? He never thought he'd live to see the day.

oOo

Notes:

_Per ardua ad astra_ - "Through struggle to the stars." I know it's the RAF motto not the USAF one, but if ever there was a motto more appropriate to SGU, I'm not sure what it is.

High five to TrueNorth, my fellow Young fangirl. As you've not been logged in, I haven't been able to thank you for your reviews privately, but I am very happy to have found another person who thinks the colonel deserves more love :) Thank you!


	8. Chapter 8

"Eli, Scott, we need to talk about this," Camile had on her most professional demeanour, managing to make her battered suit look pressed by sheer force of personality. Just at that moment, at the tail end of the stunned silence that followed the shuttle's disappearance, Scott despised her. She caught his eye nevertheless and jerked her head to indicate one of the smaller rooms away from the bridge. "In private."

"There's nothing to talk about," he said. "In Col. Young's absence I'm in charge and I say we're going after them."

"Well, that's one of the points we need to discuss. You are in charge of the military contingent on this ship, but this crew is composed of at least 50% civilians, and I am here to make sure that their welfare is considered when any decision is made. So yes, we do need to talk, and if you don't want to air all our dirty linen in public I suggest you and Eli come with me to a private room to do it."

"Wait a minute," Brody looked up from his console, frowning, Park and Volker glancing at him, as if preparing to close ranks behind him. "Who made Eli chief science-officer replacement? He's not even officially employed by the SGC yet - they were still giving him the hard sell when all this happened. It's Lisa's place, seniority-wise."

"I don't want it!" Park rocked back in her chair, startled and dismayed. "I've got enough to do with bridge shifts and hydroponics and... Volker, you do it."

"Me? I get to be chief science officer because no one else wants the job? Yay me. But if you're going to do that then I say it's going to be Eli."

"Hey, hey!" Eli waved the frantic jazz hands of denial. "When I said 'who died and left me in charge' I didn't mean it to actually turn out that way, guys."

"You people," Scott said, probably unwisely but he couldn't help it. Did they have to run around squawking like chickens in every single emergency? "Jeeze. Get a grip. We're going to get them back, so it doesn't matter who's in charge. You've just gotta figure out how to do it. End of discussion."

Camile gave him a look of pure zero degree K disdain. "Whether to get them back or not is not the end of the discussion. It's one of the things we need to consider carefully. I know everyone's running on instinct at the moment, but we need to be calm and work this through rationally."

It wasn't so much instinct as years and years of training, repeating the ideal until to disagree with it became unthinkable. "We do not leave a man behind." It was part of the bedrock of the service - part of what made the Air Force the family Scott had never had. He'd seen it guide Young's actions every single day under the man's command, one of the things he admired about the colonel. It was not getting abandoned on his watch.

But unbelievably Camile didn't seem to be moved. She hitched herself into the command chair like she had a right to it. "Well, since you insist on having the discussion here, let's do it. Do we know whether they survived? Where they are now? Do we know that - if they did - it's even possible for Destiny to get to the same place? Do we know that going into this thing won't simply rip the ship apart and kill us all? Because if we don't know these things I cannot let you endanger the eighty people on board this ship for the sake of two, no matter how important those people might be."

Eli exchanged a look of horror with him. "Are you kidding? Are you seriously suggesting we just shrug and sail on past? Because that's... I mean I'd be the first to agree that Rush is a bit of a bastard, but we ought to at least ___try_to get him back."

"Perhaps we should all take a moment." Camile stared Eli down just as sternly as she had with Scott, giving no impression that she had heard what either of them said. "You and the science team can discuss who you're going to put in charge. Then when you have a liaison, the three of us can work out where to go from here."

"OK," Scott attempted to re-establish some form of control. It had slipped out of his hands before he'd even noticed what she was up to. She really was slicker than she appeared, wasn't she? The mutiny should have clued him in to that, but she'd been so unassuming ever since, he'd forgotten. "Let's go with that. Camile, how about you scope us out a conference room and we'll meet in fifteen minutes and go through this."

The unexpected concession clearly raised her suspicions - she narrowed her eyes at him - but he tried to look innocent. As nature had served him well there, by blessing him with an open, trustworthy face, eventually she nodded and left.

The science team looked at him with a shared expression of wary uncertainty, even Chloe in on it, as Eli wrung his hands. And shit, they'd been his friends before this happened. If he couldn't get it fixed that would end right now. The colonel did not have friends on board, and suddenly Scott could see why.

"Eli?"

"Yeah?"

"I don't wanna do this job."

Math-boy laughed, wide eyed, with a little sideways shake of the head as if he was trying to dislodge something stuck in his hair. "Yeah, no kidding. Me neither."

"So pick for your liaison whoever's least use in working this problem. Then me and him - or her, sorry Lisa - will keep Camile distracted while you take us through this dang thing and get us our people back."

"Whoa," Eli grinned, already moving back behind his console, flipping through screens of data. "Isn't the shit going to hit the fan with the IOA when she figures that one out?"

"Well yeah," Scott felt better about this already. Of course it would work. Last minute rescues always did. "But if she's right and it's that dangerous, it's going to be the least of our problems, and if she's wrong and we get them back, it's going to be Col. Young's problem. So I'm personally unconcerned with that."

oOo

After nearly two months as cavemen, the sight of the gate was like the first sight of Destiny. Rush felt the old sharp hit of curiosity and awe and excitement like the flipping of a switch. Integral parts of himself booted up again after a long power outage.

Habit had him check out the cave for tonight before he investigated further. A larger underground complex this time, carved by water, if the smoothness of the surfaces was any indication.

He found the door a little disturbing - he'd have preferred it half the size - but on the other hand the entrance to the octosaur nest Destiny's time-swapped AU crew had exploded with C4 still gaped like an uninhabited hole, grassed over.

"Abandoned, maybe?" he asked Young, who hunkered down beside it and gave the pockmarked ground a careful look.

"Yeah. I think. These are burrows from that feathery snake thing. The one that tastes like rabbit? We usually only come across them between nests. So yeah, I guess we got them so good last time they never came back."

Over the past few weeks they had learned that the octosaurs were only active in their own territories. These stretched in a five to fifteen mile radius around the funnel like entrance of their nests. In the clear patches between, larger, edible animals were able to thrive, coming in and grazing during the day, leaving the territory before sunset. Only unwary youngsters or adults disorientated by illness or age would linger long enough in the kill zone to provide the octosaurs with a late supper.

Rush found this discovery soothing. The sheer voraciousness of the animals and their apparent ubiquity had seemed to challenge all rationality. How could they be everywhere and eat everything without wiping themselves out through over-predation? It had been eerie and inexplicable and therefore terrifying. Now their behaviour made some sense he had learned to think of them with less horror, as a bather regards sharks when he knows where it's safe to swim.

"But we'll still go for the cave," Young dusted off his hands and looked at the gate with an expression Rush thought might be a stoic copy of his own. "No sense in letting our guard down right at the end."

"God no. I wouldn't sleep outdoors on this planet if you paid me."

Rush wanted to go over to the gate and touch it. Metal - he never thought he'd miss it until it was gone. Wanted to open the base panel and run a diagnostic, to get the feel of circuitry back into his fingers, to bring his brain back up to speed.

"I want to try making this doorway smaller with some of the loose boulders..." Young trailed off, watching him with a slight smile. On the ship, Rush had always interpreted that expression as _'____thinks he's on to me, does he?__'_ but recently he'd learned there were many benefits to himself when Young could take an accurate guess at what he was thinking.

It happened again now. "But you should check the gate. No point in settling in here for the long term if the gate's down too."

There was a terrifying thought. Needing no more persuasion, Rush left the colonel to his building project and plunged into the long missed world of technology like a desert traveller plunging into an oasis.

Five other gate addresses showed up on the remote, none of them Destiny's. He ran the diagnostics and then he dialled the first, sending the kino through and then stepping after.

Wind and heat. A rosy sky and a beach that sparkled as if every grain of sand was a diamond. It was indescribably tacky.

He did think for a moment of re-dialling from here, setting off on his own, with his own newly acquired survival skills and no one to hold him back. Freedom. No need to explain himself or compromise. But the thought of being without Young's patient, steady competence by his side was not as appealing as he had expected. It was pleasant not to have to do everything on his own. And he would miss the sex. So he retrieved the kino, stepped back through the gate, looked up, checked the time.

"We're definitely losing daylight," he came through the now much more comfortably sized door to find the fire had already been lit. Tonight the mattress was full of dried leaves from beneath the local trees - the ones that smelled like green tea.

Young nodded. "I noticed. It's getting cold in the mornings too. Now we don't have to walk, we should forage and catch as much as we can, preserve it, lay it down for the winter - or for Destiny when she comes. If I dig a couple of grain pits, can I get you to harvest the meadow of corn-grass down by the stream?"

Oh joy. More menial work, of the kind Rush had been trying to avoid all his life - brain offline, soul slowly suffocating under the grinding ordinary sameness of it all. "How long are we going to wait before we can agree that she's not coming?"

He paced, not liking the size of the darkness beyond the fire. Getting to the gate had been a fine goal, but it had been achieved. What next? "Because I know I let you run with the idea that Destiny might be coming, but I'm not convinced. And even if she was, she could have been here already and gone."

"I was thinking 'as long as it takes'." Young gave him a look of alert curiosity. Rush searched his conscience but there was nothing he was hiding at the moment, so the look felt less like an accusation, and more like innocent interest. "You have other options?"

"We dial back up or down the gate system until we find somewhere with a spaceship. One comes to mind, in fact."

"On the planet where I left you." Young didn't even flinch this time, but this was his professional face - calm, impassive, detached. He'd probably just angst about it tonight and fail to sleep. It was an amusing little revenge to know that Young still suffered from that incident, when Rush had let it go a long time ago.

"That's the one. Now I can't repair it, I tried. But if we fire it up, the chances are the Nakai will come to investigate-"

"And you think the two of us could take one of their ships, with bow and arrows and the single clip of ammunition I have left?"

"They're not that tough. Chloe and I got out, stole one of their shuttles. You and I could do better."

"They let you go, both of you," Young's smile was harsh. "You were both compromised." And yes, these were bitter waters to revisit. So many mistakes and poor assumptions and effort wasted on unattainable goals.

"Well I never said it was going to be easy. But if we took a ship we could fly it through the wormhole, back to Destiny."

"And if she was here at the time, looking for us?"

"She's not coming, I keep telling you. We need to find our own way out. We should go. Now, preferably. Tomorrow, at least."

Young attempted to untangle some of the knots in his hair with his fingers, averting his face so that he could think. Then he leaned back against the wall and gave Rush an awkward inviting look, half apology and half entreaty. He seemed to think the two them were in some sort of relationship now, and that therefore there would be cuddling.

Normally, this wouldn't follow, but it was getting cold, so Rush acknowledged the utility of sitting down with his back supported by Young's chest, even to being snugged into the warmth of a loose embrace while the fire shone on his face.

"You're my science expert Rush, yes? Look at it this way. I'm your people expert. I'm telling you that Scott and Greer are coming for us even if they have to force everyone on that ship into it at gunpoint. They're coming - it's a certainty - and we need to be here to be found."

Rush should probably just walk through the gate tomorrow, knowing that guilt would drive the other man through behind him. It would be quick, expedient. No waiting around, no compromises.

But maybe Young had a point - maybe___that _was the answer to the mystery of how, after two years of Rush's attempts to get rid of him, he was more securely in charge than ever. Maybe it was people - some kind of low, instinctual understanding of how people worked. In which case, Young could be right.

Panic tried to overwhelm him at the thought of staying here forever, worse than TV chat shows and football, and passing out paralytic in front of the local pub on a Friday night because you'd no better reason to live.

"I can't," he insisted, appealing to sympathy after all. Well, why not, if it was the right tool for the job? "I can't live like this forever. I___can't _I'd rather die in a fire-fight tomorrow than live like this for 'as long as it takes.'"

Young set his forehead down on Rush's shoulder, as if everything was too heavy and he needed help holding it up. But then he straightened, calm, resolved, and gave in with the easy simplicity that so long ago had convinced Rush he was a pushover, incapable of effective command, unworthy of Rush's Destiny.

"Then we'll stay until the first snowfall. Stockpile anyway, just in case. And we'll leave in the winter. When it snows."


	9. Chapter 9

"What did I tell you, I'm good! This is smooth!" Eli was all but dancing behind his console, his grin brilliant. "I extrapolated their course from the telemetry and then I plotted a course to the same destination, only with less turbulence for Destiny. See," He looked pointedly at Camile, who was standing by TJ's side with a thunderous expression and her arms tightly crossed. "Nothing to worry about."

"I am filing an official complaint against both of you with the IOA, on charges of disregarding orders and endangering everyone aboard."

"But we're not endangered," Eli protested. "That's my point." He gave a cocky little headshake, widening his eyes. TJ found the gesture amusingly reminiscent of Rush. "Because I'm just that smart. And actually..."

The superstructure of the ship transmitted the vibration and the high-pitched hollow clunk of Destiny's charging collectors engaging, scooping energy out of the twisting vortices of the wormhole. "Actually we're getting a refuelling stop out of it too."

TJ was trying her hardest not to hope. Given the ease with which everything fell apart at the slightest opportunity, it was always best to assume the worst. But she didn't seem to be able to stop it, her natural, persistent optimism letting her down. Maybe this time would be different. Maybe this time no one would be hurt, they would arrive in time, and nothing irreplaceable would be lost and no more guilt be gained. Maybe this time-

Destiny surged into real space, an oddly familiar planet turning gently ahead of her. Scott took her into orbit, clearly trying to maintain some kind of professional neutrality himself, but also clearly failing. His face was carefully blank, but his eyes shone.

"And yes!" Eli punched the air. "Destiny is picking up the signature of her shuttle down on the planet. Not much power in it. Looks like it's not so much parked as crashed. But it's there and whole enough to still be transmitting. Which means they probably made it down there alive."

"Ergh, guys," Brody had been checking the database, matching known locations. "Guys, this may not be good news."

He sent his findings to the main viewscreen, and as TJ squinted at it, trying to decipher the dense Ancient phrases, Eli's smile turned into a flinch. "Oh no. No, that is not good. Damn."

"What is it?" She felt more like herself, these days, when carrying this feeling of sickening dread. "What's wrong?"

"Well," Eli tried to shrug it off with a fake smile, "I might be wrong. But actually I'm totally not. Heh, you know, sometimes I think someone up there is out to get us? I mean, I told them these things never turn out well, but did they listen?"

"Eli!" she snapped, trying to derail the unhelpful panic. "What?"

"I think we've just come out at the planet of the vampire lizards."

A silence, as they all remembered the kino footage, the gruesome scenes of the away team being eaten alive. And then Scott, bless him, said "It might still be day time down there. They might still be OK. We should send a team to check."

"Heh," Eli laughed, nervously, his eyes averted from TJ's face. "Well, that's not actually the worst news. The worst news is that we came out in the same place, but not in the same time as them. We're four and a half months later in time than they were - they've been down there nearly half a year, guys. They're long gone."

It was easier to defend herself from despair than it was from hope - she'd had plenty of practice. Rush would probably prove inedible just to spite the creatures, and Colonel Young... Young was a rock. Whatever the tempest, he would outlast it, let it batter him and break over him, and when it had done he would still be there, still standing. It was his way.

They were neither of them the kind of people one could afford to rule out. "Well, we're here now," she said calmly. "We should at least look."

The kino showed daylight, dim and grey under heavy cloud though it was. So she stepped through the gate after it and got a blast of icy air in the face. The ground was hard as deck plating under her boots, and despite her tight control over her regrets, she remembered Caine and the other settlers on Eden, their skin chilling beneath her fingers as they froze from the inside out.

But frankly she'd no idea how they'd managed to die of hypothermia in a dry shelter on a planet covered in trees. "We huddled round candles to keep warm"? Idiots. Col. Young at least would know...

And yes. Relief tried to mob her. She thrust it back down, just in case it proved false, and went closer. The long scar of a fire-pit made a black exclamation mark in the gate clearing. Wooden frames covered in stretched leather ringed it, either as wind-breaks or as... but no, probably for its own sake. The crew could use leather. After two years constant wear the clothes situation was becoming dire. New trousers, new jackets, that would be very welcome.

"They're here," Greer grinned, coming to stand beside her, assault rifle cradled carefully in his hands. "And laying in stores."

"They ___were _here," she hunkered down and passed a palm over the ashes in the pit. A thin layer of ice had formed atop them "This hasn't been lit for a while."

"Tracks this way," Varro shouted, also close to the ground, looking at the way the grass had been trodden down in a long established path.

They followed it and found a cave entrance. A small initial chamber with a mattress and furs, cups and nets, a cold cook-pot on a cold fire. Any doubt at all that Rush had once been there was set to rest by the lacy decoration of the walls, black equations written one on top of the other, at least five layers deep.

A narrow passage and a slope down and the walls widened out again, allowing them to wander through a stocked storehouse. The beam of her torch picked out nets of tubers, leather bags of dried fruit and mushrooms, nuts and eggs, strips of smoked meat, more leather and furs. Even a couple of pots of the anaesthetic lizard venom that the infirmary was getting so low on.

Greer whistled between his teeth in appreciation. "Well damn. Real food tonight."

"Yeah," TJ tried not to notice that the stores were cold, the cave complex was cold. There was very little smell of smoke and none of it hanging blue overhead. She radioed in to Scott on board. "Scott, this is TJ. We need a team down here asap to get some stores aboard. Bring as many sleds as we have."

"Copy that TJ. Will do. Did you find them?"

But the cave was large and well ventilated. It could have cooled entirely, the smoke ___could _have cleared since this morning.

"Not yet."

Back up and out to the dreary overcast day, and she couldn't hold back the thought any more. "What if they're not here any more?"

Greer's smile had a kind of peace to it she wished she could feel for herself. "Col. Young knows we're coming, so he's here," he said, soft and sure like it was all so simple. He watched her face for a moment, tilting his head, and then his smile broadened. "Radio him. He just doesn't know we've arrived, that's all."

She had had that kind of faith herself once. Before. Before passing the colonel's quarters on the way to her own after Barnes' birthday booze-up. She'd been feeling like a friend to all the world, and when she'd seen him drinking alone, reading his emails from Earth and looking so goddamn desolate, what else could she do but go in?

She still wasn't sure whether she'd been comforting him, or he'd just been acquiescing to her curiosity. It didn't really matter, did it? Neither of them had meant it to happen.

When they'd come to their senses, both agreed that this was unprofessional and could not go on, she'd thought the subtle awkwardness that was left between them would be the worst of the long-term effects. With a new posting, even that should have settled into a fond memory and a faint regret. Only later had it become apparent that they'd ruined each other's lives.

So yes. Since then it was hard to forget that no one was infallible. Given a chance, everything went straight to hell - that was the way their luck worked - and she was _afraid_. Afraid to radio and find no answer – to find that the colonel had waited as long as he could, but Destiny had come too late.

She hesitated so long that Greer gave her a 'man up' look and took out his own radio. "Greer to Young. Are you receiving? Your lift has arrived."

She'd had longer moments recently, enough to grow familiar with the breathless squeeze and the silent litany of ___please, please, please_that only Scott had any real belief would be heard by someone who cared. There was time for that high dive moment, the feeling of stepping off, beginning to plummet.

Then the radio crackled, "Young to Greer. Sergeant, you cut it pretty close to the wire, but man, am I pleased to hear your voice." And doubt and ambiguity vanished to be swallowed up in one overwhelming moment of joy. She pressed her hands over her mouth, keeping back any inappropriate noises, but allowed herself to give Greer the hug it would be safest not to give to Young. Greer seemed to appreciate it, at least, high fiveing her when she'd done.

It was Rush who got back first. TJ tried not to allow her amusement to colour her smile, because he looked like he'd reverted to one of his Viking ancestors - his beard grown bushy and his hair so long it had to be tied back in a tail. He wore a shaggy fur coat over his distinctive T-shirts, and was towing a kino sled on which rode a dozen dripping lobster pots and a net of green stuff. He left it to hover beside the fire-pit as he walked up.

It was bizarre to see him so changed in what for TJ had been only three and a half hours. Even his expression had more obvious pleasure and less defensive arrogance than usual. But his words were reassuringly expected. "What took you so long? Where's Eli? I'm going to have to have a word with him about his margins."

Also expected – there was a red graze along his cheekbone, as though his face had been shoved into a wall, and his lower lip had scabbed where it must have been split a few days earlier. On the one hand she didn't approve, but on the other, she was pretty sure he must have deserved it. Some things never changed.

Otherwise, in her professional opinion, he looked better than he had ever been, having put on some muscle and acquired a tan. He seemed steadier too – a little less frantic, a little less exhausted. His eyes had brightened and his movements lost some of their abbreviated, jerky, impatient quality.

"I'll leave you to deal with all of this then, shall I?" he said, noticing how her gaze rested on the little injuries, and giving her an extraordinarily complicated smile, which she thought added up to amusement with something smug and vicious underneath. "I'll go back aboard. I have work to do."

"That's fine." Her relief at seeing him alive wore off. "But swing by the infirmary later today for a check-up, just to be sure."

It took Young another half an hour to arrive, coming out of the woods with his rifle on his back, his own fur coat in one hand, the other steadying the dead deer-like creature he had draped over his shoulder.

He looked good too. ___Damn_, he looked good. Like someone whose chronic pain has finally lifted – he'd lost his frown, walked like he was confident and strong and happy. It was a look she hadn't seen on him before and it___really _suited him.

Big warm smile as he took Greer's outstretched hand in both of his and tugged him into a hug. Everything more constrained and delicate and cautious for her, because the uncomplicated, unthinking affection he had with the best of his people was another thing between them that had not survived. They had to be so careful now, and sometimes that hurt.

"Guys. I am so glad... We were going to leave when it snowed," Young looked up at the lowering sky, the frost standing out like white leaves on the trees against the dark grey cloud. "Pretty sure it would have snowed tomorrow. Another day and we'd have been gone."


	10. Chapter 10

"Welcome home, sir," Scott seized him by the hand as he came through the gate, grinning like a little boy, proud of himself and defiant all at once. Camile was waiting just behind the lieutenant, with a sour expression, so maybe it wasn't prudent to give Matt the hug he'd given to Ron, but there were times that prudence was not the right way to go, and this definitely qualified as one of them.

He clapped Scott on the back and echoed his grin, "I understand I have you to thank for the rescue, lieutenant? Nice work."

"Me and Eli, sir."

"Knew I could rely on you."

"Yes, sir."

"We need to talk," Camile was beside him before he'd got three steps past, while he was still trying to process the oddity of recycled air and smooth metal underfoot, shake himself out of relaxation and solitude, reacclimatize to command.

"Hi Camile," he said, trying to forestall the problem, whatever it was, until he'd had time to adjust. "Nice to see you again after so long."

"It's been four hours for me," she eyed his throat as though she meant to go for it, giving him a faintly disgusted look. He tugged his jacket collar further up. "And I have already had to file an official complaint with the IOA over Lt. Scott's reckless behaviour and complete undermining of the command structure it's taken you and I years to perfect. While we are all very pleased you're all right, he shut me out of the decision and acted behind my back, and I will not stand for that, when we had just begun to have a system that worked fairly for everyone on board."

Young heard what she wasn't saying, and was largely relieved. The situation had not required action at gun-point then, good. That would make it a great deal easier to resolve. Plus, if they'd only been gone four hours (as far as Destiny's crew were concerned,) there would have been no time for new systems to grow up in his absence which he might need to destroy, or control, or adapt to. He could slot back into his place without having to fight for it again. All of which was rather better than he had feared, and meant that he could afford to give himself space to think.

He turned towards his quarters, "As I'm sure you can tell, I could really use a shower. Give me a run down of what happened as we walk. Then when I'm not quite so fragrant, I'll have a word with Eli and Scott, make sure it doesn't happen again."

"That would be a great deal more effective if you hadn't just congratulated them on a good job."

He acknowledged the fairness of this point with a slight nod, but left it up to her to tell him what she wanted him to do about it. She was perfectly capable of doing this without needing to be prompted.

"I want you to talk to General O'Neill about it. An IOA rebuke is not going to carry as much weight as a reprimand from the military chain of command. And O'Neill is not as partial towards Scott as you are."

Ducking into his quarters, he listened to her account of the rescue as he grabbed the last spare set of fatigues, a towel and his razor. It came down to the usual dilemma - how much is an individual life worth when weighed against the risk to the entire crew? "Hm," he said, "You have a point. But Eli claimed it was safe?"

"Eli is an untrained boy with no official standing in this organisation."

And - in the absence of Rush - also the person most capable of making that kind of judgement call. Even with Rush present, Eli was often more reliable and always more truthful. Scott had done the right thing to trust Eli's advice and act on it - what else were the scientists for?

But he could see where Camile was coming from nevertheless. The sheer mathematics of the decision would have given him pause too. No matter how he tried to minimize it, sometimes you did have to make the harder choice, and you always had to consider it.

So, how to resolve this fairly? Scott might benefit from having the other side of things pointed out to him – Young was pretty sure he hadn't paused to consider the fates of the eighty equally important people aboard before he'd acted, and that was something he would have to learn if he was ever going to command in future.

Plus, as Camile pointed out, Scott had knocked a hole in the reciprocal trust he'd been trying to build between military and civilian command staff. Camile deserved to know that he took that seriously, that he took seriously his responsibility for the lives and rights of the civilians aboard, as much as for his own people.

He wouldn't put Scott's career on the line to make the point, but Scott's little manoeuvre behind the back of IOA bureaucracy was classic O'Neill in style. The general would undoubtedly be tickled pink by it. Maybe even impressed. It couldn't do Scott any real harm.

Of course, the general would also think Young was a patsy for running to him with something so trivial, but out here O'Neill's good opinion counted for very little. Young was happy enough to sacrifice the general's goodwill in exchange for Camile's.

"I'll speak to O'Neill," he conceded, wrongfooting her anger. "And to Scott. I'll read him the riot act. You want to be there to make sure?"

At the concession she paused and looked at him, bright eyed, with that little cynical twist to her lips that was the only thing about her that made her look older than Chloe. "No, I've made the complaint, I trust you to act on it." And she lapsed into quiet warmth. "I _am_ glad you're back. I had no idea Scott was so... he seems such an innocent."

He smiled back, glad to see her emerge from the shell of her office. "He's growing up. I'm getting grey hairs," he offered, deadpan, watched her snort and walk away with some relief.

They'd washed in rivers and lakes, and lately in pots of hot water, shivering before sunrise, but the shower was bliss. His hair was sticky and stiff with smoke, and the smell of it lingered even after he'd scrubbed it twice with homemade soap, so he hacked most of it off with his knife. Dressed in new clothes, short haired again, he looked at himself in the mirror and wasn't sure what he was seeing. A new start, maybe. A new chance to get it right.

Which meant some painful goodbyes.

He headed for the infirmary before he could second-guess himself, got TJ's best smile as he walked in, the big, pleased, semi-mischievous one that made the ends of her lips curl up. Such a contrast to her usual solemnity. These days, only Varro received that smile on a regular basis, which was a great deal better than the dubiously-ex-pirate could possibly deserve.

"Lieutenant," he said, feeling rebuked by her happiness. "I keep thinking I need to catch up on the last four months, but I gather it's only been half a day for you?"

"Yes sir. " She toned the smile down, let him breathe a sigh of something - guilt maybe? Relief? He wasn't sure. Something complicated and painful, at least. He sat on the edge of the nearest gurney and told himself that it didn't matter any more. "Nothing's actually changed since you left."

That was nowhere near true, but then she wasn't to know.

"Dr. Rush has just been for his check-up," she pulled out a blood-pressure cuff and motioned for him to take off his jacket. "I can't believe he came back from that place significantly healthier than he was when he left. I assume he has you to thank for that."

He folded his jacket, his back towards her, put it down carefully and smoothed the creases out. "I guess. He's got the skills now, but he still hasn't got the temperament to last for long on his own."

She had turned to lay out stethoscope, penlight and thermometer on the table next to her, so he faced her and let her pull the cuff tight around his arm, her gaze on the dials. "I can see that," she agreed. "He's a sprinter, but long term survival is all about patience and stamina, which you've got in spades."

She looked up, and four months ago his heart would have leapt at the warmth in her eyes. Constantly wrestling it back down, putting a lid on it for the sake of career and crew and professionalism had been another one of those things that had left him so very worn that he had scarcely anything left to give back.

It was still like an icepick to the chest when her smiling blue gaze alighted on his throat. He watched her catalogue the bite marks no longer hidden under his jacket collar, watched as the warmth and the light went out, and she slammed down the facade she used for dealing with strangers.

"So," she reached up a hand to his jaw and pushed his face to one side so she could look at the bruises more closely. "I'm guessing you two are getting along a little better these days."

His instinct was to apologise, because he had hurt her, because he was still hurting her, but he held it back. She wanted Varro, that was pretty damn clear, now there was no reason why she should not have him. He had been messing her up with mixed signals for far too long, and this was the right decision, not something for which he needed to say sorry.

So he shrugged, uncomfortably. "You could say that."

She turned away. A long moment with her back to him, one hand down on the table of instruments, the other pressed to her mouth. Again, instinct told him to get up, hug her, at least put a reassuring hand down in the centre of her back, let her know he was there for her, that he cared.

And he was, and he did, but this was not the time.

Eventually she straightened up, picked up the penlight, now with the solemn serenity of a statue of the Madonna. He put that expression on her face too often. Hopefully this was the last time.

"Do I have to give you the talk about domestic violence?" she asked, blinding first one eye and then the other as she checked his pupils.

"I'm sorry?"

"I noticed Dr. Rush was sporting a split lip and grazes. Are you hitting him?"

That was a low and unexpected blow. Revenge, possibly, because surely there was no way she could really believe it? "TJ! Don't you know me at all?"

She gave a faintly watery laugh and curled her fingers around his wrist to time his pulse. "Because he's never turned up after an away mission with you looking like he's been through a mincer."

That she could think such a thing of him was like being sucked out of an airlock. He went cold. He couldn't breathe. "That was different and you know it."

"Then do you want to explain how he came back injured?"

Bloody Rush. God. This was what came of attempting to give the man what he wanted – more misunderstandings and accusations. If this thing between them was going to carry on in future, he was going to have to draw some very firm lines. "He got the marks the same way I got mine. You really think I'd beat up someone I was... involved with... like that? In that context?"

For the first time she looked him in the eye again, softening, like she couldn't hold off the resurgence of her compassion no matter what the cause. Or maybe like she found his squirming embarrassment amusing.

"No. No I don't," she allowed at last, with a small reminiscing smile. "In fact, you're the last person I'd think it of, normally. But you have to admit, he's always been the one exception to your rules. I'm... I'm just a little concerned that an intimate relationship between the two of you is likely to be every bit as dysfunctional as your working relationship. He brings out the worst in you."

And yes, initial reaction aside, he could see her point, though he wasn't sure if she wasn't talking to the wrong guy about it. Neither of them would have bruises if it was up to him. "Yeah, I hear you. But we've been working some of that stuff out. I think we're good. Better, anyway, than we were."

He passed a hand through his newly shorn hair, still surprised that it finished long before he expected it to. He wanted to find a way to explain that this wasn't just about him going off with someone else, it was about his belief that she should now feel free to do the same. But that was pretty patronising, wasn't it? It wasn't up to him to tell her what to think.

So he settled on a resigned sigh and some painful honesty. "Besides, I don't even know whether he's going to want to keep this up, now we're home. It was very much an 'only other human on the planet' deal, you know? He went straight back to avoiding me the moment we came on board."

He wasn't sure what he'd said to amuse her, but her lips quirked. "You do have a history of picking them, don't you sir?"

As always, she kept on being stronger than he feared, as admirable as she was beautiful. He smiled back, relieved. "What are you talking about, lieutenant? My taste is irreproachable. It's only my timing that could use a little work."


	11. Chapter 11

Rush wiped the dust off his hands and looked at the wall. Smooth metal, adequate lighting, he was not half done marvelling at how much better it was to be back on Destiny than stuck in the stone age down on the planet.

He crossed one arm over his chest, supported the elbow of the other on top of it, and touched the healing bite on his lower lip with his fingers, worrying it gently for the grounding effect of the ache.

It had seemed obvious at first that as soon as he was back in his place on board, everything would go back to normal. Here he needed no one to do physical labour for him, no one to keep an eye out for predators, or bring in food, or provide desultory conversation in the dark, not so much to break the silence as to prove that he wasn't alone.

Young was good at that, though. Good at being in a room as though he wasn't really there – somehow managing to provide the benefits of solitude and the benefits of company both at the same time.

Rush looked back at his equations in frustration. Bugger it. That was a factor he'd forgotten to take into account. He'd have to find a notation for it and figure it in.

He rubbed out workings until he had a swathe of clean metal and began again.

Sleep was how he'd started to approach the question. He'd blazed through work today with an efficiency that took him aback. He didn't want to think that interfering busy-bodies had been right all his life when they'd told him that rest would make him more productive, not less. Nonsense old folk-wisdom. There had been enough ill-defined talk like that in his recent decision making, it was time to apply some rigour.

So he had ended up here, trying to work out whether it made him more or less effective to get regular sleep, to eat regularly. And if he was solving that as a mathematical problem, why not go further and determine the influence of regular sex on his mental functioning?

But that too had seemed too simple, and he had begun to weigh the more unverifiable but real consequences of emotional, and possibly practical, support from Young against the inevitable backlash from the rest of the crew. How detrimental to his processing would be the sniggers, and the whispers that he'd somehow been tamed? How devastating would be the inevitable fallout when they ended up trying to kill each other again? Would it all be worth it?

These were all frustratingly difficult problems to model. And it didn't help that he was missing a significant datum – he didn't even know that continuance was an option.

He flung the chalk down, annoyed with himself. What was the point? What was the point of going through all of this analysis if he wasn't going to have the balls to even go and ask the question? Answers first. He could worry about the rest of it when he knew where he stood.

oOo

It's starting to sink in with them that we may never be going back, sir."

Twenty three forty five, and Lt. James had spent the last half an hour giving Young a run-down of the discipline problems in her squad. If he'd still been on the planet he would have been asleep right now, curled up in a warm nest of grass and fur with Rush. He was glad to be back, of course he was, but he could see why his earlier self had been so deeply, grindingly tired, and it was hard not to fret at the thought that he had left all of those things behind.

On the other hand, James' squad's problems were symptomatic of discipline problems throughout the ship. Nothing unexpected, but nothing he and his officers could afford to ignore.

"They don't know why they should have to adhere to the standards of some distant organisation millions of light years away," she said, "when we're out here all alone, and we could be making our own rules. I don't know what to tell them, to be honest, sir. I think they've got a point."

Well, that wouldn't do. He took his glasses off, set them down carefully on the desk, and fixed her with his sternest expression. No warmth, no bullshit, no doubt. "You tell them, lieutenant, in no uncertain terms, that they will be held to those standards because those standards make us who we are. We are not a bunch of thugs with guns like the Lucian Alliance, we are proud members of the USAF."

He leaned forward, deliberately intimidating. "And you can tell them that I will personally see to it that anyone who behaves in a manner that is unworthy of this uniform will be punished exactly as though they were on Earth. They had better not forget it."

Clearly restraining a desire to back away, James gave him an unsettled look, partly astonished and partly reassured. Not wholly convinced. He'd noticed before that no one quite knew how to take it when he was harsh. They weren't used to it. Truthfully, he'd worked damn hard to get to a point where they didn't have to get used to it. Where he could carry on looking unassuming and behaving as though the smooth running of the human machinery of Destiny happened all by itself with no real input from him.

But every so often it needed a nudge, and this was obviously one of those times.

"And then," he went on, more softly, "When you've made sure they know you hold the reins, you listen to them, off the record, and if you think their complaint is valid you bring it to me."

He backed off, smiled, and watched her relax in turn – still at parade rest, but her muscles no longer locked, her eyes relieved.

"If there's a better way of doing things, I'm willing to hear it and adapt," he offered. "But that has to take place slowly, in a measured process and under control. Tell your men things can change overnight and they'll want it all their own way at once. Then your authority will be shot and you'll be in deep shit, taking their orders instead of the other way around. You do not want that."

The hollow metallic beat of someone knocking on the wall outside punctuated his words. James' eyes flicked to the door as it opened without his permission, revealing Rush lounging in the door frame.

"No sir," James seemed thoughtful but resolute when she looked back. "I hadn't thought of it like that, but I see what you mean. No wonder the officers are paid so much more than the men."

"The ugly truth is that we have to keep on top of them 24/7, lieutenant. We're the only thing that stands between this ship and an anarchy of trained killers."

Young stood, with a hornet's nest of agitation lodged suddenly beneath his ribs. "If we have good people, it's because we have a system in place to keep them that way. We do not tamper with that system at a whim."

A moment's awkwardness, as Rush refused to move and James dithered over whether to squeeze past him on the way out. "If that's all? It looks like Dr. Rush has something to discuss with me."

"Of course, sir." She saluted and made for the door. Rush gave way at the last moment, stepping into the room before she passed.

Rush too had clearly been reacquainting himself with the luxuries of civilisation. He had laundered his shirts, his hair was washed and glossy, but the real shocker was that someone must have leant him a razor. He was clean shaven as he had been on Icarus, his hawk-like face fully revealed, nothing masking the look of amused curiosity, or the hint of uncertainty in the corner of his mouth.

"I didn't think you saw your role quite that clearly," he said, as Young slid out from behind his desk to come closer.

"Because of course, in all my years in the service, I would never have thought about how to do my job?"

Rush's look of amusement deepened. "Because y'give the impression you think it's all about family and love and all that rot. Whereas deep down you're as much of a cynical old bastard as I am."

This reflection seemed to please him, so Young didn't say___'when it's working well it _is___about family and trust and all the good things about being human. That doesn't mean it's not also about the brutalities of who's in control._' Rush didn't like ambiguity – would see the messy truth as some sort of moral failing, an inability to make up his mind.

"Pretty sure you didn't come here to discuss power and kinship structures in social interaction," he said instead, giving in to the impulse to reach out and stroke the backs of his fingers down Rush's newly smooth cheek.

Rush stepped away, making him drop his hand and his hopes.

"So what can I do for you?"

Rush seemed to think the desk was insulting him. He directed a bitter smile its way. Then he looked up and skewered Young through the eye with a hostile gaze. "I came to say that I presume our___ arrangement_is over. I would have left it implicit, but I'm trying to apply some of that mutual cooperation we talked about."

The direct result of being pierced with that intent look was as always a combination of fright and desire. It took him a while to filter that out, to think through the words, and to figure out that Rush was___asking him_if it was over, not telling him it was. The fright settled at the thought, and the desire urged him to take a step closer. "Why would you presume that?"

"Well," Rush jerked his head in the direction of the door, as if to indicate TJ in the distant infirmary, or perhaps just the departing Lt. James' statuesque charms. "Y'have better prospects now. Female ones. Ones that would accept your... authority... with considerably less difficulty than I would."

And that was true. He had wondered, in fact, whether being surrounded all day by Camile and James and especially by TJ, would reset something in him, take away his ability to look at Rush and see anything desirable. But if that was going to happen at all it had not happened yet. If anything he found the man more perfect by comparison - slight but sharp, delicate but formidable, something to be protected and feared at the same time. All encompassing.

Young brought up his hand again and smoothed a thumb along Rush's naked jaw. This time the scientist stood still for it, even tilted his head into the touch with a small triumphant smile.

"Well, lets just say I like the challenge." He tried to crowd in close, but Rush stepped away again, backing off towards the wall, and he knew this game well enough to lunge in and push the man, stumbling and bright eyed, until his shoulders met metal and he could go no further.

"But it's very much in your interests to stop right now," Rush said, mocking voice belied by the way he licked his split lip. Young pinned him in place with an arm across his chest and leaned in to capture his smart mouth, push with his tongue on the little wound and suckle it between his teeth.

Rush's voice dissolved into incoherence, but he hooked a leg around Young's hips and pulled him closer with all his considerable strength.

Young resisted, just to show that Rush was not the only one in this 'arrangement' capable of being contrary. "Why's that?"

There were really far too many reasons to count, but he was curious as to which one Rush would pick.

"It's not going to stay a secret on this ship, is it?"

Also very true. Young was all too aware of the unlockable door behind him, and the crew's tendency to walk in on him whenever they felt like it. It added a certain thrill of danger to his untucking of Rush's shirt, unwrapping him with the care and anticipation with which as a child he had slowly peeled his presents out of their paper. "Mm-hmn."

"So eventually someone will tell someone in Homeworld Command, where 'don't ask, don't tell' is a recent and vivid memory."

This was a question that deserved to be taken seriously. Young let up on the pressure, left Rush half-exposed, with one arm out of his shirt and the other still in, looking disgruntled and dishevelled and kind of adorable with it. "Yeah," he agreed. "Telford's been looking for an excuse to replace me for years, and this could very well be it."

"Seriously?" Rush wriggled his shirts off properly and dumped them on the ground, apparently disgusted by the stupidity, but slightly intrigued. "I was asking if you could stand the inevitable disdain. But you're seriously saying it could still be used to leverage you out of command?"

Young wasn't quite sure what to make of the intrigue - somewhere on a parallel track in the back of Rush's mind, had a new plan to depose him started up?

"It could. There's some pretty vocal Christian senators behind the funding of the SGC who wouldn't take kindly to the knowledge that Destiny's CO and chief scientist were literally in bed together. They could put plenty of pressure on the generals to maybe order me to stand down."

Young had never really thought that Rush was crazy. He was a little highly strung maybe, but on the whole more clinically rational than any man decently ought to be. But he sure had a crazy-person smile, all creases and teeth, that came out when he was feeling particularly pleased.

Rush bent his head as if to hide it, and began unbuckling Young's belt. "And that doesn't... bother you?" he asked, his voice doing something Young had to struggle to place. Delighted? Sinister? "You'd take that risk to be with me?"

Oh, it was___ touched._He was startled and moved by the discovery that someone felt he was worth the cost.

Young thought about how to reply. He could mention that he was not exactly happy at how interested Rush was in the prospect of a new way to destroy him. He could admit that if his moral failings motivated the SGC to pull out the stops and send Telford to replace him, he'd consider the supply line that came with him worth the cost. He might even dare share the unthinkable thought that if they merely told him to step down, he would refuse.

But those answers were not what was needed, in the context of standing pressed tight to his lover with one of Rush's hands up his shirt and the other pushing down his trousers, with Rush's face still averted and his smile beginning to take on again its old, defensive ironies. With the silence tightening long and wire thin around them both.

"If I'd have been there," he vowed instead, bowing his head and whispering it against Rush's grazed cheekbone, "outside the library, I'd have knocked those boys on their asses for you. I'd have helped you get your books. I'd have kept those bastards away while you studied. It's what I'm for."

Rush inhaled, sharp, as though Young had stabbed him, glanced up at him with eyes dark with agony. Looked away again, pressing the heel of his hand to his forehead, as if ashamed that he had given away so much.

"They'd have fucked you over too, if you had. There were too many of them. There still are. These days they do it with a smile, but if they think you've got a dream or a hope higher than theirs, they'll tear you apart as soon as look at you."

"Bring it on." The conversation had swung rapidly from no strings attached sex straight into a depth of intimacy he'd scarcely had with anyone, even Emily. He found it addictive and raw and kind of wonderful. "When you think what we've faced down already, nothing in this universe stands a chance against both of us working together."

"You're thirty years too late to be my protector," Rush snapped, grabbing Young's jacket and pulling him in to a kiss that was more like a punch to the mouth.

Young smiled and yielded to the pressure of tongue and teeth, let himself be hauled forwards, swung around and crammed into the bulkhead by Rush's angry energy. "But you'll let me try."

"Fuck you."

"If you like." He warded Rush's furious attentions off with a splayed hand on the man's chest. "But not until you give me a straight answer. Will you let me try?"

Rush gave him an intent look, steel sharp but strangely bright, like the anger was a thin cover over exultation. "Fuck you," he said again, still fighting to get closer, fighting for supremacy, fighting to bring them together. "___Maybe__._"

Young laughed and gave in.


End file.
